White Light, Black Rain is an unforgettably powerful HBO documentary about the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Difficult but necessary viewing. As the New York Times says, "The film is a blunt reminder that the goings-on in Germany were not the only 'never again' to emerge from World War II."

Interview with J.K. Rowling in O magazine from January 2001. Pretty interesting--Rowling discusses one of her favorite books, why her main character is a boy, and class consciousness in the series.

Excused

So I got up early today and dragged myself to jury duty. I was called to jury duty in March of this year. I recall filling out the juror questionnaire online and asking for an exemption because I was a student. A few days later I got an e-mail saying that my request to be excused was denied. But then I received a letter saying that my court had been cancelled and to report on Aug. 7 at 8:30 a.m. instead, nearly four months after I had originally been called. Which was weird, but I saved the date and showed up at the courthouse today.

A woman scanned my juror badge and said to see the lady at the window. The lady at the window said that I had been excused after all but the letter telling me to report was mailed out before it was approved. It would have been nice of them to inform me of this earlier. I was puzzled but I just said OK and walked out. Actually, I was a little disappointed. I think it would be interesting to serve on a jury. I had already gotten myself out of bed and driven to the courthouse, part of me wanted to go back and say, let me serve anyway, but I'm not that much of a nerd. Now I think I'm going to try and get some sleep...

Change is hard. I now recognize it's a pattern, that the times I'm most stressed out are times of transition. It's not like I can stop life from changing; all I can do is find a way to deal until things reach equilibrium again.

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours doing a sudoku puzzle. I wish life were more like sudoku. I wish the answers were all there waiting to be discovered logically one after the other. Maybe they are. Maybe I will look back at the end of my life and realize that there was this grand order to it. Or maybe life is a sudoku puzzle that will never be solved? Some of the answers come easily but others will elude us until the very end.

Medical Meltdown

From Discover magazine, "Iraq's Medical Meltdown":

In one of the most damning reports of American policy failures, "Iraqi Hospitals Ailing Under U.S. Occupation," journalist Dahr Jamail cites a litany of horrors evident in Iraqi hospitals in and near Baghdad. At Arabic Children's Hospital, patients brought their own food because the hospital lacked funds to provide meals. Chuwader Hospital operated with only 15 percent of their necessary water supply. The toilet on the intensive care unit at Al-Karkh Hospital looked like a sewage nightmare of the most noxious order.
....
According to the report 'Medical Support of the U.S. Army in Vietnam 1965-1970,' U.S. military clinicians treated some 220,000 Vietnamese civilians a month through the Medical Civic Action Program (MEDCAP) in 1970. As a result of the Military Provincial Health Assistance Program,teams of 16 Americans augmented the clinical staff in each of 30 civilian hospitals.

"I don't think there are many MEDCAP missions at all now," says Burke. "There is no presence of U.S. military in Iraqi hospitals. Our troops get space-age medicine, but 70 percent of the Iraqis injured in the same blast die."
......
Although the Iraqi Ministry of Health has refused to report the number of injured civilians, the medical journal The Lancet estimtes the number of seriously wounded Iraqis at nearly a million. According to the World Health Organization, there were a total of about 35,000 hospital beds in Iraq in 2005.

According to my calculations, that's approximately 30 seriously wounded Iraqis per hospital bed.

Over the weekend I watched The Russian Dolls (thanks to Stu for the idea, apparently his favorite film of last year) and it is probably the best movie sequel I've ever seen. Along with its predecessor L'Auberge Espagnole, these are two fun yet honest films about young adult relationships. Yes, both movies are mostly in French, but please don't let that intimidate you, these are really worth seeing, even if you have to read subtitles for a couple of hours.

I finally checked the results of my poll...it's 4-1 dogs. Who needs cats anyway? Thanks to the five of you who voted. I also attempted to create a new poll about the presidential candidates but Blogger is having some issues.

Randomness

- It's all over--I finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But I will hold off writing about it so as not to give away the plot. Now I can read the reviews and see if I agree with them.
- Cloudy weather depresses me.
- Has anyone seen anything good on TV lately? I am trying to find a series to start following. I watched an episode of Mad Men on AMC the other day. It was OK but I don't think I'll start watching it regularly. Then last night I started watching Damages on FX, but Glenn Close's character seemed too mean to sympathize with. I also watched John from Cincinnati on HBO but it seemed stupid to me. I suppose I should give these shows more of a chance before I decide that they are not worth watching. They all seem sort of the same to me, like they cloned one HBO series over and over, complete with self-absorbed characters and gratuitous adult content. Maybe when the fall TV season starts I'll find something worth watching.

From a funny essay about swimming pools in TIME: "Most people, like most pools, have a deep end and a shallow one." The house I grew up in had a pool in the backyard. Steve Rushin is right--a swimming pool is dangerous and indulgent but also tons of fun.

Another interesting word

anomie - n. 1. Social instability caused by erosion of standards and values.
2. Alienation and purposelessness experienced by a person or a class as a result of a lack of standards, values, or ideals: "We must now brace ourselves for disquisitions on peer pressure, adolescent anomie and rage" (Charles Krauthammer).

Source: American Heritage Dictionary via dictionary.com

I caught the mouse

Yesterday morning I caught the mouse. My mom and I really hadn't been too aggressive about catching it before. We had set out some wimpy glue traps and moved some of its food sources out of the bottom cupboard thinking that would give it incentive to move on. But enough is enough. I was seeing it nearly every night, I could sometimes hear it gnawing inside the kitchen cabinets, and I kept finding droppings in the kitchen. On Wednesday night I laid out two heavy-duty glue mousetraps, basically long plastic trays coated with about a quarter-inch of super-sticky glue.

The next morning the mouse got caught in the sticky mess. It was a tiny gray-brown thing. Its little legs were trapped in the goo and it was exhausting itself trying to get out. I grabbed the trap, a bottle of oil, and a pencil (to unstick it with) and went outside. I went down the block and crossed the street to where there is a huge expanse of desert. I poured some oil into the tray and proceeded to try to unstick the mouse. Its hind legs came free, then I tried its front ones. It wiggled like crazy and I grabbed it and tried to pull it free. At that point the mouse bit my finger, hard. But it was now free from the trap and I dropped it into the dirt. It stayed next to a bush for a few moments, its fur stained with oil, and that was the last I saw of it. I turned away, crossed the street again, and when I got to the house I immediately washed my finger.

My hand hasn't turned black and I am not foaming at the mouth so I don't think I got some deadly disease from the mouse bite. But poor mouse. It was so cute, cute enough to be a pet. But this was no pet mouse. I thought of how I'd seen the mouse previously, how it moved so smoothly and quietly in the night. It could get into the tiniest of spaces. Then I thought of it in the trap, having the crappiest day of its life so far, trying so hard to get out. And me dumping it out in the desert. At least I didn't kill it outright with poison or with a snap trap. I don't think I could have taken that. Did I effectively kill it by leaving it out in the desert? On this point I think ignorance is bliss.

So that's the end of the story with one mouse. There might be another one roaming around. Mom supposedly saw a fat mouse in the kitchen cupboard one morning and the one I trapped was definitely not fat, so the traps will stay out. I really hope I won't have to do this again, though. Bugs are one thing, I don't think twice about killing them, but causing harm to cute little rodents is not something I enjoy doing.

Funny mime performance of Natalie Imbruglia's Torn (scroll down to No. 9). Natalie Imbruglia is a really good sport.

- Progress on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: p. 137. I'm generally not a very fast reader. I usually like to take my time reading a book, even with Harry Potter.
- The mouse made another appearance last night. As far as I know we have cut off its major food supply. Hopefully it will move on soon.
- "I Believe in a Thing Called Love" is currently playing on Pandora, reminding me that The Darkness is a pretty cool band.
- I keep wavering between wanting the summer to be over and wanting it never to end. I'm conflicted.

Try this banana pudding recipe

I've been cooking more in the past few weeks. Yesterday I made tuna patties (tuna, carrot, onion and bread crumbs dipped in egg and cooked on a skillet) for dinner. I also made brownies for dessert :-). Two weeks ago I attempted my mother's favorite recipe for banana pudding. It was surprisingly easy and it is really delicious (recipe reprinted from this site on about.com):

INGREDIENTS:
1 (14-ounce) can sweetened condensed milk (NOT evaporated milk)
1-1/2 cups cold water
1 (4-serving-size) package instant French vanilla pudding and pie filling mix
2 cups (1 pint) heavy whipping cream
40 vanilla wafers cookies (about)
3 to 4 medium bananas, sliced and dipped in lemon juice from concentrate
4 vanilla wafers, crushed to crumbs for garnish

PREPARATION:
Combine sweetened condensed milk and water in a large mixing bowl. Add pudding mix and beat on medium speed for 3 minutes. Refrigerate pudding mixture for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, whip heavy cream to stiff peaks. Fold whipped cream into chilled pudding mixture until combined. Select a large (3-quart) decorative glass bowl. Spread 1/2 cup of pudding around the bottom of the bowl and top with one-third of the vanilla wafers, followed by one-third of the bananas and one-third of the remaining pudding. Continue layers, finishing with pudding on top. Sprinkle with crushed vanilla wafer crumbs. Chill at least 4 hours before serving. Refrigerate leftovers.
Yield: 8 to 10 servings

Fandango

Inspired by an article in the El Paso Times from a few weeks ago, I ordered Fandango from Netflix. This movie is the very definition of gonzo and I can understand why it is considered a cult classic. It's about five guys (the "Groovers") taking a road trip through West Texas after their college graduation. It's over-the-top and there are gaping holes in the plot but this is the type of movie where the plot is besides the point. And of course I loved the setting for the movie; if you've ever driven through West Texas you will recognize the landscape. The ending was filmed in San Elizario, and my dad informed me that my great-uncle was an extra. Very cool.

In August issue of Discover magazine, Bruno Maddox speculates on why science fiction has ceased to matter:

For one, it was around that time, the mid-1990s, that fiction—all
fiction—finally became obsolete as a delivery system for big ideas. Whatever the
cause—dwindling attention spans, underfunded schools, something to do with the
Internet—the fact is these days that if a Top Thinker wakes up one morning
aghast at man’s inhumanity to man, he’s probably going to dash off a 300-word
op-ed and e-mail it to The New York Times, or better still, just stick it up on
his blog, typos and all, not cancel his appointments for the next seven years so
he can bang out War and Peace in a shed. If one truly has something to say,
seems to be the consensus, then why not just come out and say it? If your goal
is to persuade and be believed about the truth of a particular point, then what
would possess you to choose to work in a genre whose very name, fiction,
explicitly warns the reader not to believe a word she reads?

It's an interesting essay, worth reading in its entirety.

Anticipation

Thirteen hours until the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I am probably more excited than I should be considering that I'm 25 and not 10. For the first time I'm even considering going to one of those midnight release parties. It would be just for fun since I already pre-ordered a copy via Amazon. It hasn't been easy to avoid reading anything about the plot of the book. Somehow the NY Times already has a review. How did they manage that? Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting the book and sequestering myself in the house for a few days.

Mouse in the house

This is gross to admit but there are mice living in my house. In the past month or so I've seen mice scampering across the floor a few times, usually at night. A few weeks ago an exterminator gave my mom and I some sticky mousetraps to trap them but with no luck. Then this morning Mom found a fat mouse in the cupboard eating flour. She trapped it in there but the question is what are we going to do with it now? I don't want to kill it. Is it really so bad to have a few mice living in your house? Any suggestions?

I upgraded the blog template and added a new poll about pet preferences on the sidebar. Dogs all the way for me. Props to Blogger for adding the new functionality. I was able to change the template while losing only a few of the changes I had made to the sidebar, a major breakthrough.

Best (and worst) concerts I've been to

I'm not too much of a concert-goer, especially lately as funds for concert tickets have been low. But I've been to a few good concerts (and a few bad ones) and I thought it might be worth recalling the best and the worst:

The best:
1. Trans-Siberian Orchestra: Classical music on steroids. The music was top-notch, the light show was mind-blowing, and last time I went they even had fake snow. Wow.
2. John Mayer, opening act Maroon 5: Maroon 5 was near the peak of their initial popularity and they played an amazing set. Could it also be that I have a tiny crush on John Mayer? Possibly. John Mayer is a great guitar player and he played through the gap between the last song and the encore, a poke at the stupidity of encores that I thought was hilarious.
3. Vertical Horizon, opening act Sister Hazel: My first concert. Sister Hazel played a cover of "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" that I loved. And Vertical Horizon had a whole line-up of great songs.
4. Matchbox 20: Maybe Matchbox 20 is way too Top 40 in a lot of ways but you forget that these guys are actually pretty good musicians. The band played a fantastic cover of "Jet".
5. Fleetwood Mac: For being older, this band put on a very energetic show. And Stevie Nicks, need I say more?

The worst:
1. Hall and Oates: It's kind of embarrassing to admit that I went to a Hall and Oates concert. I don't know how you manage to make elevator music more boring, but they did. A very rote performance and they barely talked to the audience at all.
2. Nickelback: I had to stand through the whole concert, I got beer spilled on me, and halfway through I realized that I don't like Nickelback's music very much.

- I am oddly excited that David and Victoria (Posh Spice) Beckham are coming to America. But it just makes so much sense to me, the glamour couple coming to live in Hollywood.
- There's nothing like The Motorcycle Diaries to make you realize how bad your Spanish is.

Sicko

Yesterday I went to see Sicko, Michael Moore's documentary about the need for health care reform in America. It's a documentary that makes you laugh and makes you cry and then makes you want to write to your congressman or woman. I liked seeing this movie in the theater because you could hear other people's reactions to it. I was on the verge of tears a couple of times during the film and there was a collective gasp at seeing the amazing benefits of the French social welfare system. And Michael Moore gets out the bullhorn one more time, this time on a boat outside of Guantanamo Bay. Even as the movie was still playing, I could hear a guy start to discuss it with the person next to him, kind of annoying but it's cool that a movie is able to inspire that kind of reaction.

What's sad is that the health care horror stories in Sicko probably won't be surprising to most of us, since if you live in America you've most likely experienced yourself and/or heard others' stories of the unfairness and cruelty of the current system. It's a system based on greed where the interests of the patient often come last. We treat health insurance like it's a luxury when it really is a necessity.


I know Michael Moore's movies tend to be one-sided and not show, for example, the downside of having a generous social welfare system. But after seeing this movie I was completely convinced that a government-run health care system is the way to go, even if it means higher taxes. In the current system, it's a struggle to even get insurance in the first place, and even then you really don't know what will happen if you get sick--your insurance company may drop you or refuse to pay for treatment because it's 'experimental', and even with coverage you may still go bankrupt paying sky-high medical bills. There's no peace of mind. Maybe state-sponsored health care won't fly with conservatives (sigh), but at the very least couldn't we have a system where everyone has at least a minimum amount of health insurance? And some way to control health care costs? It's about time. Sicko is definitely a thought-provoking movie and I hope it will inspire some desperately needed reforms.

"Shall we gather by the river
Where bright angel feet have trod;
With its crystal tide forever
Flowing by the throne of God?"

From my piano book, lyrics from "An American Hymn" by Robert Lowry. Almost as pretty as the music.

Excellent NY Times editorial mapping out a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq:

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out
this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are
withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as
possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

Best movies I've seen so far this summer: Ratatouille (SO cute) and The Commitments.

Why are you so quiet?

During a break at my exercise class the other day a girl came up to me and said, “You’re so quiet. Are you always like this?” And I half-smiled and just said, “Yeah.” What I really wanted to say is, is it still that obvious that I’m shy? There, I said it. I’m shy.

This isn’t exactly a new development. In my earliest memories I am shy. I remember being too inhibited to talk to the other kids at a birthday party. I remember sitting at the coloring station in kindergarten afraid to talk to the girl sitting next to me. I was always sure the other kids wouldn’t like me, a feeling that has persisted for years and years. I don’t know where that came from, since my parents never told me anything like that. If anything, they spoiled me and thought everything I did was great. As far as I can tell I was born shy.

Some people grow out of shyness but unfortunately I wasn’t one of them. I just couldn’t understand why it was so easy for other people to just open their mouths and say something and why everyone else seemed to have more and better friends than I did. This wasn’t a case of being “a little shy.” This was a bizarre fear where I just couldn’t get to know people. I was a good student but a complete dunce socially. You often hear the adjective “crippling” attached to shyness. It really is crippling, sort of like having two broken legs. You’re not able to get around socially. As a result of being shy, I was a lonely and often unhappy kid. The middle school years, especially, were nearly unbearable.

When I was old enough to reflect on this I tried different things to cope. I told my parents but after awhile I realized that they couldn’t help me. They tried, but I think that they just couldn’t understand the depth of the problem. I made resolutions: I told myself that this year I’m not going to be shy, I’m going to be very outgoing and talkative. This usually lasted about a month, at which point I found it too difficult to keep up and I’d go back to being my quiet self. I tried prayer, but I found that God couldn’t help with this one. I tried positive self-talk—I thought if I just had the right attitude about myself I wouldn’t be shy anymore. That didn’t work either. Nothing seemed to work.

I struggled on and by high school things had settled down a bit. In high school I would say I was surviving socially. I had mostly accepted my shyness and thought that this was how it was going to be for the rest of my life. Things still weren’t great but I had a few misfit friends I could talk to. I still didn’t know what was “wrong” with me or how to “fix” it, but I was reasonably content.
I was 17 before I knew anything worth knowing about shyness. One day in the school library I happened to pick up a copy of Psychology Today magazine and there was an excellent article on shyness. Its conclusion: there is nothing wrong with shy people, medically or psychiatrically, and the solution to shyness is simply to develop better social skills. OK, maybe this seems extremely obvious. But I had never read anything about shyness before, ever. And it was such a relief to know that 1) nothing was wrong with me. I really had thought that something was wrong me for which I should possibly be taking medication. And 2) there was something I could do about it, a difficult but effective solution backed up by plenty of research.

Knowledge is power, and this article changed my view of shyness completely. It was like turning on a light after years of stumbling around in the dark. It was also around this time that I got on the Internet (the good old days of AOL) and found the newsgroup alt.support.shyness, fairly useless now but a godsend at the time, as I had never known anyone who was as shy as I was. Finally I didn’t feel alone in this struggle. At 17, I knew more about shyness than I ever had before.

I can’t say that things changed immediately after I read that article and that suddenly I wasn’t shy. I was still shy, but I realized that I had the power to change things and began to work in earnest on my social skills. And it actually worked. As soon as I started to work on things like “small talk” skills, things did improve for me. I did feel more confident in social situations. However, it wasn’t easy to change patterns of behavior so ingrained in me from such an early age. A lot of times it was two steps forward, one step back. And I still struggle though I think I have become progressively less shy over the years.

In Shyness: A Bold New Approach, a book based on his Psychology Today article, shyness expert Bernardo Carducci likens shyness to hay fever, and I think it’s a great comparison. Like hay fever it’s a source of discomfort that will never be totally cured, but you can find appropriate ways to deal with it. “[Allergy sufferers] don’t have to live in sanitary, plastic bubbles, but they will stay away from gardens in bloom, springtime fields, and florists’ shops. They can enjoy life once they learn to control their exposure to what makes them uncomfortable.” (46)

Part of the reason I’m writing this is that I find that most people do not have a good understanding of shyness, especially the type of chronic shyness I have struggled with. Unless you have this particular problem yourself, most people can’t understand being so shy that you have great difficulty starting conversations and making friends. Hence situations like the one in my exercise class. Even so-called professionals don’t understand shyness. I’ve been to therapy a couple of times, and both times I found the therapists unsuccessful at helping me deal with this problem. One told me to “just accept yourself.” Another gave me some self-esteem exercises to work on. If either of them had read Carducci’s research they would know that neither of these approaches is optimal. Which leads me to believe that treating shyness is not generally taught as part of therapists’ training, and it should be.

I spent so much time in my childhood and adolescence unhappy and I think it’s really awful that I wasn’t able to find some help for this until I was 17. If I had only known, or my parents had known, how to deal with shyness I think I could have avoided some of the hell of loneliness I went through. Maybe I would have actually gone to the prom in high school. Or not, since proms are kind of stupid anyway. But friends are always good, and I didn’t have enough of them growing up. Maybe I would have even been able to lead more of a normal life and not think of myself as a freak. And that’s the main reason for writing this, so that someone else might read this and not have to struggle as much as I did.

Here are the best resources I’ve found for overcoming shyness, three of which I’ve already mentioned:
Psychology Today article by Bernardo J. Carducci, Ph.D.: A great article. Read the whole thing.
Shyness: A Bold New Approach also by Carducci: The only good book about shyness, in my opinion. Must-read for anyone struggling with shyness.
alt.support.shyness FAQ: Some good information. I wouldn’t recommend the actual newsgroup at this point, though.
Some great, practical advice for overcoming shyness from someone who has been through the experience.

I finally found a copy of this on the web (scroll down the page): You Know You're From El Paso When..... Funny.

My favorite mix CD

Created June 9, 2005
1. "Four Seasons" Vivaldi
2. "You Get What You Give" New Radicals
3. "Lost in Space" Aimee Mann
4. "Disappear" Hoobastank
5. "If I Ain't Got You" Alicia Keys
6. "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" The Proclaimers
7. "Find Your Way Back Home" Dishwalla
8. "The Sound of Silence" Simon and Garfunkel
9. "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" Tears for Fears

Summer fun at the Diablos

I skipped Italian class yesterday in favor of baseball, $3 tacos, and fireworks. Yes, the Diablos. The tacos were a major disappointment with pre-packaged taco shells. That's blasphemy, especially in this town. And more points off for no salsa. I guess that's what you get for $3. The family and I had great seats in the sixth row near third base, and there were some pretty enthusiastic fans in our section. "It was IN!" this guy yelled, leaping out of his chair on a bad call by the umpire, nearly into the laps of the two people sitting next to him (including me). They also kept ribbing the other team's batters. A batter with shoulder-length blond hair is up: "Let's get Goldilocks out of here!" Then a guy who looked about my height (very short) goes to bat: "Who let the bat boy play?" Unfortunately the Diablos' effort came up short: they lost 9-6. On to fireworks. They were spectacular, as usual, with music from the EP Youth Symphony. The tacos were bad, the team lost, the fireworks were good, so they went one-for-three. Ah, whatever, I think it's impossible not to have a good time at a Diablos game.

Check out the gorgeous pictures in Anne's Food, a Blogger Blog of Note. Now I'm getting hungry...

Dispatches from the Edge

Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (2006) is Anderson Cooper’s memoir of his experiences reporting on some of the most horrific wars and natural disasters of the past 15 years—Bosnia, Rwanda, the 2004 tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, and others. It’s compelling subject matter, and Cooper brings an immediacy to each story through his lucid but choppy writing style. I could so easily imagine Anderson Cooper reading this on 360, even the sections about his own life. But despite the choppiness of it, Cooper does a fantastic job of describing what really goes on during a crisis situation. Cooper describes the stories that you don’t get to see on the news, and as you may expect, they are heart-wrenching. Over and over again, Cooper seeks out dangerous situations and comes face to face with violence, death, and suffering. In particular, the section about Hurricane Katrina is shattering.

Cooper seems addicted to the rush of a crisis, but there is a deeper reason for seeking out these disastrous scenes than just the adrenaline rush. It seems telling others’ stories of loss helps him make sense of his own pain from the deaths of his father and brother. Throughout the book, Cooper weaves in his attempts to come to terms with these losses. At times this seems awkward, like maybe he should have written another book with that as the focus. But I suppose his point is that death and suffering are universal; even the author with his privileged background hasn’t escaped tragedy.

I liked the fact that Cooper doesn’t gloss over the sensationalism of TV news, the push to find the most shocking story and record it on camera, and he expresses some guilt over it. However, you get the impression that he does care deeply about helping people and about bringing attention to causes that warrant it.

Maybe this book isn’t for everyone. However, if you have a strong stomach and are interested in news, Dispatches from the Edge is a well-written, emotionally affecting look at the life of a TV correspondent that is definitely worth your time.

Photos from UTEP

Here are some photos of my favorite spots at UTEP that I took a few weeks ago. Click on the photo below to see the entire set.

www.flickr.com annette_c_a's UTEP photos photoset

Mandy Moore has a new album. I like Mandy Moore. Somehow she strikes me as far less vapid than most pop singer/actresses. I think my opinion of her changed after she dyed her hair brown and even more when she took a role in Saved.

It's a quarter til 9 p.m. when my Italian class lets out and after that I head straight to Starbucks. I want something cold and I want something with chocolate in it. I see a raspberry mocha frappuccino advertised as the special so I order that. I wait in line, there's one guy in line in front of me. A few minutes later I get my order. It comes with a nice crown of whipped cream and some raspberry glaze drizzled across the top. Nice. I take it outside, sit at a table on the patio. No one else is out there. The air has the feel of a warm bath and I just want to sink into it. So I sit for awhile and watch the last bit of the sunset. There are some clouds dark against the still-blue sky in the west. A lone star is out (actually, it's probably a planet, according to a book I read once).

I wonder if I'll ever go to Italy. Instead of a Starbucks, maybe someday I'll be at a real Italian cafe where I'll sit on a sidewalk and tell the waiter, Vorrei un cappuccino, per favore. I wish. Something about Italian agrees with me--the vibrancy of it, the constant "ch" sound, the full vowel sounds. Italiano e molto bello (Italian is very beautiful), and I am happy at the progress I'm making in my continuing ed class.

It's the height of summer and I have these long stretches of time that I have no idea what to do with. Time just extends and extends, and I am uncomfortable with it. Who's to say what is a good use of time, though? Just because I'm not being productive as far as making money or earning school credits, does that mean I'm wasting time?

This has been causing me a lot of anxiety lately, but my angst melts away sitting outside Starbucks. For first time this year I recall what summer is all about. It's 9:00 on a weeknight and I don't have any place to be. I can spend 20 minutes watching the remnants of a sunset and sipping a frappuccino. It's beautiful and peaceful and once I finally take the time to sit down and appreciate the moment I don't feel guilty about it. Those 20 minutes end up being so enjoyable that I leave thinking I should watch the sunset every day.

I wonder if I'll remember this summer five or ten years down the road. I wonder what I'll be doing next summer. I can honestly say I don't know. Some people plan their whole lives out. They have career plans, time tables, agendas. At the very least they have some kind of image in their mind of how they see their lives playing out. Maybe I'm stupid for not having that. I think many of my failures in life have been a result, at least partially, on a lack of planning.

But the truth is, life frustrates me and people frustrate me and maybe I've always secretly been waiting for some way out of the whole business, some way to escape the conventions of society and still do something important. So far I've managed to escape a lot of the conventions but I have yet to do anything I consider very meaningful.

After a certain point of sitting around with all the time in the world, the boredom lessens. Your mind is free to start thinking about possibilities. You start thinking about what you have and haven't done, what you'd like to do, how you're going to save the world. You start thinking about having cappuccinos in Italy. And it ends up being pretty cool.

Spam

This spam e-mail was in my inbox this morning:
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The Assault on Reason

I've known for some time that the policies of the Bush administration are deeply flawed (thank you, Jon Stewart). However, I have to admit it has been a while since I've thought very deeply about the U.S. system of government--its Constitution, the intent of its founders, the rights of the individual, and the system of checks and balances. It seems every day you read a news story about another ethical violation of the Bush administration. But up to now I had never really connected the dots and thought about those stories in terms of the Constitution.

Leave it to Al Gore to put it all together in The Assault on Reason and show us just how outrageous the policies of this administration are. Gore explains in clear language why this administration's policies have violated the very core principles that this country was founded on. He explains in detail the administration's perpetuation of misinformation (including the selling of the Iraq war on false premises), obsession with secrecy, and drive for an ever more powerful executive branch. This is a president who has suspended the rights of habeas corpus for prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and has supported the use of torture.

However, The Assault on Reason is not simply a listing of the Bush administration's (many)wrongs. Gore's larger argument is that what is wrong with America is a decline in reason as the basis for in decision-making, and the Bush presidency is only a sympton of that. He sees the decline of print and the rise of TV as the major source of information and entertainment as a key factor in people's disengagement with the political system, as people feel a sense of powerlessness because of the one-way flow of information television provides. And televison plays on the emotions, rather than engaging people's reasoning abilities, and because of that PR experts, e.g. those in the Bush administration, are able to manipulate the population using fear-based tactics. People form opinions based on what they see on sound bites or 30-second television ads rather than reading about the issues.

This makes a lot of sense to me. While I don't think it explains everything that's wrong with society today, clearly the dominance of television is a big part of it (along with the failing educational system, but that's another story). People are just plain uninformed about government and politics. How can you possibly get a good grasp on current events from TV news? For example, I have never seen local TV news program explain candidates' positions on issues during an election in any level of detail. And these days even CNN isn't beyond ad nauseum coverage of celebrity "news".

This is not a fun book to read, but it's definitely an important book to read. The Assault on Reason should be required reading in high school history classes. I appreciated the fact that the book isn't based on petty politics or a personal vendetta against George W. Bush. This is a sober look at policies that violate the U.S. Constitution, and Gore expresses an appropriate level of anger that I think every single American should feel at the Bush adminstration's actions. We should all be marching in the streets about this stuff. But we're not.

Gore is optimistic that the rise of the Internet, as a two-way medium will spur people into political action and get them more involved in the issues. Honestly, I don't know if I am quite so optimistic. Sure, the Internet is definitely better than television as a way to obtain information and possibly get involved in politics. But isn't the Internet becoming more like regular television every day with the rise of YouTube? How do you get people to quit watching funny videos and start caring about political issues? I don't know the answer to that. But despite my lack of optimism about the Internet, Al Gore is still my hero and I am 100 percent convinced that if he were President right now there would be no need to write this book.

Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too

I've been claiming "You Get What You Give" by the New Radicals as my favorite song for years (since the first time I heard it back in the '90s, actually) without owning the CD it was from. I finally broke down and decided to buy Maybe You've Been Brainwashed Too when I saw a used copy for $1 on Amazon ($4 with shipping). Not a great sign when an album goes that cheap, but I thought I might be pleasantly surprised. If anything, at least I would have another copy of my favorite song.

This album is odd in that I don't know whether to recommend it or not. True, I can't stop listening to it. There are some really catchy, sophisticated pop hooks on here, both fun and melancholy, that draw you in. Besides my favorite song, which is, of course, awesome, a few of the other tracks show similar brilliance. But the lyrics are another story, ranging from immature to crude to just plain cheesy. Case in point, "Someday We'll Know", possibly the cheesiest lyrics I've ever heard in my life. Most of the songs are about some guy pouting because this great girl dumped him, and given how immature and under the influence this guy sounds, you can't really blame her.

However, maybe I'm weird because I find the cheesiness of the lyrics sort of funny, and Gregg Alexander's subversive commentary on society is good for a few laughs. So my final recommendation is to buy this if you like pop music and can stand a few stupid lyrics.

The NBC Nightly News was broadcast from El Paso tonight. You can watch stories from the broadcast via this website (click on Tale of two Cities for a profile of El Paso and Juarez), and here's a blog entry about it with comments from some El Pasoans.

Today was the first time I bought beer and didn't get carded. I am getting old.

Sunday, Father's Day. It was a perfect summer day. My cousin hosted a family get-together for the first time. My cousin, married, with her own house, it's hard to believe. We had steaks and salad and yogurt-and-berry pie, yummy. It was so hot outside, near 100 degrees, but we still sat in chairs outside on the shady back porch talking.

I never know what to get my father. I finally settled on a gift card to Applebee's because I know he'll use it. Too impersonal? Maybe. I've given up on meaningful and have settled for functional.

I had to buy gas after work so I went to the gas station on Mesa and University. On the way to the freeway I drove down University Avenue, through the UTEP campus. The campus was deserted, as might be expected. I have three sets of memories of my time at UTEP: undergrad, grad school the first time, and grad school the second time. But the memories I had on this night were of undergrad years and as I drove I felt a twinge of sadness at the realization that those days are never coming back. Sort of like losing a favorite photograph. That chapter of my life is lost and becoming more lost every second.

Cool blog: David Byrne Journal (yes, of the Talking Heads).

Blog gossip

I opened up my newsreader to find it was a milestone day for blogs:

• The Waiter from Waiter Rant announced that he quit his job at the restaurant (!) yesterday
• Knit-a-Little is back, woo hoo
• It's Wilful Sunflower's blogiversary
• It's La Brown Girl's birthday

I'm slightly bored at the moment. There is embarrassingly little going on in my life. I wish there were 14 hours of daylight when I had papers to write and work was exploding. But I am not in school and this is the slowest time of the year at work, so I find myself with an insane amount of time to fill. So far I've signed up for an Italian class (Come stai? means How are you?, Quanti anni hai? means How old are you? and pomodoro means tomato) and a strength training class on Saturday mornings (just like gym class, only for old people). Maybe if I ever go to Italy I can impress people with my language skills and my well-developed biceps? lol.

Besides those classes I have a stack of books I'm planning to read, which I'll probably end up writing about on here, and there's always Netflix. Enough to keep me quasi-occupied as my summer of boredom continues, I suppose....

Cool idea from The Assault on Reason by Al Gore:
"The relationship between faith, reason, and fear sometimes resembles the children's game of rock, paper, scissors. Fear displaces reason, reason challenges faith, faith overcomes fear." (45)
This is the only non-textbook I've ever read where I've felt compelled to underline key points. Highly recommended.

Accident

Today around 1:00 in the afternoon my sister called, crying, saying, "Annette, you have to come now. I got into a car accident at the post office." My heart skipped a beat, but apparently she was well enough to get to the phone and wasn't in the emergency room, so I didn't ask any questions, just said, "OK, I'm going," hung up the phone and ran straight out the door to drive to the post office.

Later on it occurred to me that that's really the definition of a family. There are four people in the world that the second they call and say, come now, I need you, I will drop everything and go. And I know they would all do the same for me.

It turned out to be a relatively minor fender-bender, with the right corner of the car dented and the back side panel partly detached. It wasn't her fault--the other driver rear-ended her as she was making a turn. My sis was crying but not hurt at all, thank God.

Car accidents are the worst. Even a minor accident is traumatic and even if it's not your fault it's a huge hassle and a humiliation. When something like this happens, you realize what is really important. Cars can be fixed or replaced, all I really cared about was that my sister was OK, and right now I'm indescribably grateful for that.

Hilarious

Check out this Sims music video of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark" on YouTube. LOL. via Leonard Martinez's column in the EP Times.

Joke

Q: How do you fit an elephant into a Safeway bag?
A: First, remove the S in "Safe". Now take out the F in "way"....

I love this interview with J.K. Rowling from 2000. Tiny excerpt:

Joanne Rowling is no good at small talk. In fact, there is a chance she is
incapable of it. Within minutes of sitting down she is talking about death and
fate.....Life does not come in a neat package, I say, and she pounces on this.
"People do want life to be neat. That is undoubtedly true. But you know the four
great truths of Buddha: the first one is 'Life is Suffering'. I love that. I
LOVE THAT. Because I think YES. Life is not supposed to be neat. And it's a
comfort. It's a comfort to all of us who have messed up. And then you find your
way back, bizarrely. And I'm sure to mess up again at some point - though, I
hope, not on such a grand scale."

Hometown pride

Story about astronaut/hometown hero Danny Olivas. Local news media are really hyping this. Apparently it's still a big deal to travel into space. Cool.

It's Day 3.5 of my cold and I'm starting to feel better. Yay!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

It took a while but yesterday I finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Book 5 of the series. I honestly can't remember the last time I was so into a book that I couldn't put it down. Crucial secrets are revealed, and there's the constant question of which character is toast this time. There is a satisfying complexity in this book, an intricacy that is really amazing. I finished the book thinking that J.K. Rowling is a genius. It's a daring book in the way Rowling completely dismantles the world of Hogwarts and takes on more mature subjects. In the Order of the Phoenix, the takeover of Hogwarts is an obvious metaphor for how a government turns into a dictatorship. Another theme is mind control and the clearing of the mind, which I found spooky and fascinating.


One thing that's interesting about these books is that on the one hand, they are about an epic struggle between good and evil, and on the other, they are about some friends going through school together, dealing with mundane things like homework and tests and relationship issues. Somehow Rowling manages to have both storylines without it seeming absurd. OK, it does seem a little weird sometimes, but it's really a feat that she's able integrate the two storylines so well most of the time.


One more book to go, then I'm caught up to read Deathly Hallows.

- No doubt about it, I have a cold. Darn.
- Slacker.com is my latest musical discovery. My loyalty still lies with Pandora, though.

Interesting post and comment thread about American vs. European higher education.

According to this, I'm a good liar. I wonder if it's true.

In general, when I compare myself to the characters in Hollywood movies I feel like a total social misfit weirdo. On the other hand, the characters in indie films make me feel like I'm completely normal and well-adjusted. I don't know which I prefer.

White Sands Adventure

Last Friday my sister twisted my arm into helping her chaperon a group of high school kids on a trip to White Sands. She promised it would be fun and assured me that I would really be helping her out. So I went. It had been awhile since I'd been to White Sands and also awhile since I'd been around teenagers. There were nine of them, five girls and four boys, a mixed bag personality-wise--some very funny and outgoing, others more shy, trying hard to fit in.

We boarded my mom's old minivan and after an uneventful 50-minute ride through scrubby desert, we arrived at the Sands. It's completely strange how there are miles and miles of standard desert, and then suddenly there are these huge white dunes. There's a scientific explanation, I guess, but it is really so bizarre, these mounds of pure white sand in the middle of nowhere. There's a feeling of being on another world. There must be some planet out there in the universe that looks just like this.

My sister parked the van at a picnic area. We unloaded our supplies and then we attempted to set up a barbecue for lunch. I'm ashamed to admit it, but neither of us had started a barbecue before. That combined with the fact that it was a windy day made it slow-going getting the fire started. The fire finally got going after about an hour, so we put some burgers and then hot dogs on the grill. Success at last, I was glad that we could at least figure this out and not have a bunch of hungry kids on our hands. I was patting myself on the back, then I bit into one of the burgers. Yuck--it tasted watery and flavorless. I give a lot of credit to the kids for not saying anything about it. Hopefully the hot dogs tasted better.

After lunch, we headed to a steep dune to do some serious sledding. The kids took turns sliding down the dune on circular plastic boards. Then my turn came up. The board went down fast, much faster than I expected. It was like flying, and I both loved and hated that queasy sensation, that feeling that this could end really, really badly.

After a few rides down the hill, everyone got tired and three of the boys insisted on having the rest of the group bury them in the sand. Tradition, I suppose, it's a rule of going to White Sands that someone has to get buried. While they did that, I sat down and watched for a few minutes, running the fine white sand through my fingers. The white sand is amazingly clean. There aren't any rocks or plants or trash in it the way there might be with beach sand. One of the girls remarked, it's so quiet out here. And it was. Beyond the noise of our little group, it was very silent.

By then it was late afternoon. The boys extricated themselves from the sand and we all drove home in my mom's old minivan, every one of us tired and covered in sand. I had sand in my hair, behind my ears, on my arms. I touched my face and it was covered in powder. I turned my shoe upside down when I got home and at least a handful amount of sand fell out of it.

Overall the trip lived up to my sister's promise of fun. I don't think I have much of a future as a chaperon (or as a barbecuer), but I think I did OK. Until the next adventure...

My new favorite word (used in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee):

weltschmerz--noun German. sorrow that one feels and accepts as one's necessary portion in life; sentimental pessimism. (dictionary.com unabridged).

Wordnet defines it as "sadness on thinking about the evils of the world."

Analysis of Price is Right in Time magazine. It's not like I go out of my way to watch Price is Right but whenever I happen to catch it I always get really into it. My faves: the big wheel and the Showcase Showdown.

Slide show

I decided to give flickr a try for displaying some photos I took of Downtown El Paso (also a couple of the desert). Enjoy.

www.flickr.com More of annette_c_a's photos

So it's officially my birthday.

Article and great pictures about a visit to Chernobyl last year, 20 years after the disaster. Mark Resnicoff writes, "Despite what many people believe, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is not a radioactive desert but, due in part to the lack of human intervention, is a beautiful, thriving ecosystem where nature flourishes." Interesting.

Please tell me I don't write like this

Off the side of a package of Sam's Choice Pecan Praline Cookies:
Your sweet tooth will find immediate gratification when you crunch the pecan praline pleasures in Sam's Choice Premium All Natural Pecan Praline Cookies. Clusters of tender roasted candied pecans are baked into this cookie masterpiece to create the ultimate cookie experience.

A cookie masterpiece? And what exactly is the "ultimate cookie experience"?

Jordin won!

A job at America's favorite drive-in

Summer, five years ago. I had applied for jobs everywhere: video stores, grocery stores, fast food restaurants. I'd had a few interviews but had not been offered anything. Then one day I saw the words "Now Hiring" on a marquee at a Sonic Drive-In. I walked into the store, and the manager, a short, overweight man with black hair and a mustache, said, Sure, I'll hire you. Easy as that, I had a job for the summer. It was the first job I got 100 percent on my own.

I took it as a good omen that the date I was officially hired was my birthday. My job was to make soft drinks during the afternoon--cherry limeades and ocean waters (Sprite with coconut flavor) and Diet Cokes with lemon. I also took orders, shoveled ice and mopped the floor. On the downside, my uniform consisted of a red Sonic polo shirt, black pants, tan Sonic visor that I felt ridiculous in the whole time I had to wear it. The place smelled like grease, and it was dirtier than it should have been in the back of the restaurant. But on the whole I liked my new job: the people I worked with were nice and making the drinks was fun. Each drink required a precision almost like you'd use in a chemistry experiment. Two squirts of this flavoring, fill to the top with this much soda, add one cherry and one lime, etc., etc. After a few weeks I learned how to create banana splits and cake sundaes.

I rate this job at number three in my list of the best jobs I've ever had. I think the orderliness and efficiency of the whole operation was the main thing. I had never worked in a fast-food restaurant before. Speed was key. Everything was very organized, set up for maximum efficiency. All the ingredients had their appointed places in white tubs: strawberry and pineapple toppings, chocolate fudge, whipped cream, cherries. It was paradoxical to be making all these delicious, aesthetically pleasing drinks and desserts in this mechanized environment. Noisy machines surrounded you: ice cream machine, soda machine, slush machine, shake blender. Even interaction with customers was mechanized, via speakers at the drive-in stalls and drive-thru. I remember one girl in particular who was practically robotic in the way she ran the drive-thru. She was a master of multi-tasking. To me it seemed like she was always doing ten things at once, making orders at the same time she was taking the next person's order. And I never saw her make a mistake. I wondered how many years of working there it would take to get to that point. Ultimately employees were just pieces in the machine, with everything done according to a processes they had no say in.

So maybe this wasn't the most creative job I've ever had, but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I didn't care that the job didn't require much as far as skills or education. Sometimes a job like that is just what you need--no ambiguity about your job description, the satisfaction of getting to work with your hands, pleasant-enough co-workers. A job where you can go home and not give a second thought to what happened at work that day. I liked it so much I ended up staying beyond the summer, into the fall. It was shortly after the winter holidays when I hung up my red shirt and brown visor for good.

Guilty pleasure

For the record, it was my sister's idea to watch all of seasons 1 and 2 of Grey's Anatomy on DVD in one weekend. I previously avoided this show like the plague but I gotta admit that now I get why the show is so addictive. It is like a disease! I can't stop watching it.

Interview with Michael Moore in Time magazine about Sicko, his new documentary. Can't wait to see it.

Take Away Shows from French site La Blogotheque. Wow, these are amazing. Check out The Shins.

As a Harry Potter fan, I found this amusing.

New photos

From my latest round of photos:



The Boots (my dog)



Some poppies that took over a rock area in an apartment complex near the house



Roses, beautiful roses

It rained so much last night I no longer have to wash my car. Awesome.

The Meaning of Wife

I found The Meaning of Wife by Anne Kingston as I was browsing in the UTEP library two weeks ago. The clever pun in the title drew me in. The title sounds like it could be a novel for women, but reading the back cover I found that it's actually a nonfiction book examining the role of wife in Western society. No, I'm not getting married, LOL. But the topic sounded interesting because the cultural roles of wife and woman are so entwined. My recent interest in Mary Astell sealed the deal and I decided to give this book a try.

Kingston, a Canadian writer, does a fantastic job of putting together research for this book. She brings in some fascinating stats and examples from magazines, books, television, and movies. She looks at public figures such as Martha Stewart, Princess Diana, and Hillary Clinton. Intriguing court cases are also a big part of the research for the book, from spousal murder cases to divorces.

At first I was going crazy trying to figure out Kingston's angle for the book. What is she saying--never, ever get married? She doesn't mention what her marital status is until the end of the book, so you don't know if she's a frustrated single or a frustrated wife (or a happy single or a happy wife, for that matter). But what I realized is that the book isn't for or against marriage; rather it's a deconstruction of messages from society about what a woman should or should not be. On the one hand, women are more liberated than ever before; on the other, we’re fed these images of marriage as an ideal. Kingston delves into how marriage is back in vogue on TV and in movies and the mini-trend of highly-educated upper class women opting out of the workforce to stay home with their children. She also describes how single women are portrayed in the media as insecure Bridget Jones-types all desperate to find a husband (for a more recent example, see this NY Times article). On the surface, it looks like we as women have regressed into old modes of behavior. But how much of this is real and how much of it is an attempt to sell wedding dresses and cleaning products? I think what Kingston accomplishes in this book is cutting through many of the stereotypes and presenting a more realistic view of women. Kingston is able to address the images of women in pop culture and expose them as often-silly, exaggerated, even manufactured constructions of what women are and should be, often quite different from what the reality is. It has made me think a little more about the messages I’m getting when I watch another movie that ends with a wedding or another TV show that depicts a flighty, neurotic single woman.

Kingston finally provides some overt commentary in the last chapter of the book. She suggests that Western society is evolving toward a state where "wife" is a gender-neutral term, a verb even, where men are just as accepted as women in the role of homemaker, someone who provides behind-the-scenes support to the spouse. It’s an interesting idea, but to me it seems a long way off. Society is changing, but not that quickly. There’s still a lot inequality in the workplace for women, and there remains an inherent unfairness in that tasks such as taking care of children and doing household chores are often automatically assigned to women. Gender roles and family roles are complicated, and from this book and from my own life, I get the feeling that we’re all just improvising solutions as we go along, which is both a good and a bad thing. Bad because it’s confusing, good because we aren’t tied to old roles and are free to make up new ones.

I highly recommend this book, especially for women. It’s hands-down the best nonfiction book I’ve read this year. It’s a well-researched book on a fascinating topic, and I think its greatest strength is that, rather than allowing this to become one of the books she analyzes that tells women what to do or what to think, Kingston lets her research and examples speak for themselves about the institution of marriage, allowing the reader to draw her own conclusions.

Younger me

Funny the things you find when you're cleaning out your room. Here I am at age 17. Not a great picture of me given my surprised and unsmiling expression but I love the details. I'm getting out of the first car I ever had, a beloved '91 Honda Accord, which I drove until I wrecked it about two years ago. Great car. There's the driveway of the house I grew up in--the picture was taken a few months before we moved in 2000. And this is easy to miss, but if you look closely you can see the top of the black ankle boots I wore to high school that day, the boots I thought were oh-so-cool, my one nod to fashion.

Good-bye to school, for now

Day 1 of freedom. I turned in the final draft of my seminar paper yesterday. I'm finally free of school obligations. Which is cool...but I'm also sort of sad about it. It's going to be a long summer. Too long, I think. It's going to take awhile to adjust from part-time worker/part-time student to part-time worker/part-time slacker.

I'll miss my classes. It's amazing how studying ancient philosophy or dissecting an old poem or reading about hegemony can shed light on the human experience. Seriously. And I've met some very interesting people--literature people, rhetoric people, people who are my age, people who are much older than me, people from other countries. I think my writing has improved, too (but I'll let you be the judge of that). I've had more practice at it, at least.

Thinking about the experiences I've had in the past two semesters, I feel like I made a really good decision to sign up for this program. I feel like I'm in the right place, like things are in alignment. I don't feel like I'm forcing myself to go on, trudging on towards graduation. At this point, school is more of a privilege than just "something to get through." I'm more appreciative of it. Despite the expense of it, I wouldn't trade the experiences of the past nine months for anything.

So it's a sad good-bye to school for the next few months since I opted not to go to summer school. I like to think that I'll be doing some exciting things now that I have all this free time, but in reality I'll probably end up staying home watching TV and doing more of "the usual."

- Last night I logged into my class discussion board and found out that my paper is now due Thursday. Woo-hoo, and thank God for the Internet.
- Around midnight I was going to watch a replay of a PBS show about Amelia Earhart. But then this scary-looking picture came up and I decided not to watch it. Given what happened to her, I think I would have had a hard time getting to sleep. Disappearances really freak me out, especially at midnight.

The following were thoughts I had after watching I'm with Lucy (off Stu's Forgotten Films list):
- Monica Potter is like a cross between Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Julia Roberts, only funnier.
- Why is Monica Potter not as famous as either of them?
- Henry Thomas (grown-up Elliott from E.T.) is still adorable.
- Three words for this movie: sweet, funny, and different. Rent it!

-I will be so happy come Wednesday when my portfolio and seminar paper are turned in. Until then it's more hours in front of the PC.
-Yesterday my mom boiled a whole bag of frozen strawberries for about half an hour and then blended them to make some sort of puree. Then we poured some of it on angel food cake. Yum.

Interesting paper on Spanglish by LA Weekly writer Daniel Hernandez. He also writes a blog. LA-centric but worth checking out.

The return of Poetry Friday on Reassigned Time.

Advice

Some next-to-last class advice from one of my professors: Write a journal. Otherwise how will you remember how you felt at different times in your life? How will you remember what happened, the good things and the bad things? If you don't write it down, it will all be lost.

I take this advice seriously, coming from a professor in his 70s. He's totally right. Things can get awfully hazy in your memory. It's good to have a record of them. Not that I really need to be nagged into keeping a journal, as journaling is more of a compulsion for me than an act of discipline. I've kept journals since I was 12, not to mention writing this blog. I can't imagine not journaling, in fact. But the prof's advice makes me think about it a little more seriously; it makes me more aware that I should be writing about things that are going on in my life instead of just angst-filled ramblings and musings about pop culture. What am I going to want to remember when I'm 70? That I watched Celebrity Fit Club on April 30?

Anyway, I just thought this was a great piece of advice, something I'd pass along, especially to those who are not particularly compelled to keep journals.

My second-to-last day of class. The clouds look like summer when it threatens to rain nearly every afternoon. I don't know why, walking back from class I noticed how green the grass looked. So absolutely stunningly green I don't think I'll ever forget it.

I stopped in the middle of channel surfing last night to watch the first 15 minutes of Celebrity Fit Club. Curiosity factor got me--Ross the Intern, Dustin Diamond (aka Screech), Maureen McCormick (aka Marcia Brady), and Kimberly Locke together on one show? Bizarre. Turns out Dustin Diamond is really, really annoying. I kind of miss Ross the Intern being on the pudgy side.

Amazing photos of Antarctica on this blog.

Interesting blog: ben.casnocha.com. I saw him give a speech a while back. Check out his bio--what had you accomplished by the time you were 19?

I finally got around to watching Who Killed the Electric Car?. It's completely insane the lengths that car companies went to to take these cars off the road. And our government is not much better. Sure, we're "addicted to oil" but where are the realistic plans to wean ourselves off our dependence on oil? This documentary is shocking and at the end I felt genuinely sad that electric cars never got a chance to catch on.

Another Saturday and I have had the house all to myself for the day. I really like this. Too much alone time can do damage to one's soul, but in smaller doses it's definitely restorative. I can listen to music and watch whatever TV shows I want. The Soup was really funny today.

I also haven't listened to music in what seems like forever. Pandora is way cool. "King of Pain", haven't heard that one in a while. That song is unintentionally funny. "There's a skeleton choking on a crust of bread." What?

Some job-related decisions have come up and they have forced me to start thinking about what I really want out of a job. And I really don't know. I mean, you can't just sit around reading books and blogs all day, you gotta find something useful to do. In general, I'm not very ambitious when it comes to having a career. Is that bad? I'd rather be happy than "successful" by the world's standards. I don't want to be living on the streets totally useless not being able to get a job. But at the same time, I don't want to have a job that I hate that I do just for the money.

What about having a job that you doesn't challenge you, with the view that you use the job to fund other aspects of your life? A "day job" with the other job being, for example, writing on your blog?

It relates back to the advice of my favorite song: you get what you give. The more you put into a career, the more you'll get back. But right now I don't know how much I want to give.

-I finally finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. All I can say is wow. Some big things happened at the end. It gets surprisingly dark for a kids book.
-McAfee VirusScan is possibly one of the most annoying products ever made. It takes about an hour to scan all my computer's files. Then I run SpyBot to delete things it missed.

Last night I watched the American Experience about the "Summer of Love" in 1967. Every time I watch TV programs about the '60s I'm amazed that all that stuff actually happened. I used to think it was silly--people dressed in tie-dyed shirts, taking acid, living in communes-- but now I don't think it was silly at all. Idealistic, maybe, but not frivolous. People really thought they were going to start a revolution. And they did, in a way. Supposedly PBS is going to make the entire program available to watch online soon.

Moved away

So strange when someone moves away, you expect her to come into the room any second the way she used to, like nothing has changed, like she isn't thousands of miles away.

This isn't like going back to college. I don't know when I'll see her again. Has it really been nearly a year since she moved back home? This was most likely the last year we'll ever live under the same roof. I'll miss watching Conan and The Office and debating about our lists of most-hated celebrities. I'll miss finding her asleep on the couch when I get home from work. I'll miss our conversations driving to and from church every Sunday, listening to country and rating the pastor's sermons. She always made me laugh.

My sister is one of the least sentimental people I know so I won't go on and get all melodramatic, just say that I'm going to miss her much more than she knows.

Coolest name ever for a band: AC Slater.

From yesterday, NMK's post on using a newsreader.

My life has been on hold for the past week or so as I tried to put together a draft of a research paper. I'll try to come up with some better posts now that that's all done with. It seems so weird to me that I once had so much time to devote to TV, blogging, reading, Internet and piano, all at the same time. Lately I haven't had much time for any of the above.

Anyway, the latest tidbits from the scrap heap that my mind is lately:
- My sister is moving to New York City on Saturday. I'm really sad about it. It's a slight consolation that I'll have a place to stay if I ever visit NYC. I'm also jealous that she will get to read the local print version of the New York Times every day.
- Mary Astell is my new hero, after reading excerpts from Some Reflections Upon Marriage. Very radical for 1700.
- I now have a newsreader. Thanks, NewMexiKen.

McGriddles = yummy

I have to give a positive review to McDonald's McGriddles breakfast sandwich. Instead of a bun or biscuit, there are two pancakes that contain beads of syrup. It's a marvel of food engineering in that it tastes like a complete pancake, egg, and bacon breakfast. Probably could have done without the gross-looking processed cheese, but overall it's definitely worth trying.

More from last week's Time (can you tell I'm behind on my magazine reading?): Lev Grossman's essay on data addiction. Grossman says Twitter is like "the cocaine of blogging or e-mail but refined into crack." lol

Beginning of Time's cover story from last week on America's broken-down army: "For most Americans, the Iraq war is both distant and never-ending."

Cat's out of the bag

Check out p. 37 of El Paso magazine's April issue.

More random thoughts

- Never get a filling. Or never get a cavity is better advice. Every time I chew something the wrong way my tooth hurts. I really need to take better care of my teeth.
- I've just spent several hours making a book review more "specific" and "concrete".
- Does anyone out there use Technorati? Is it any good? How about Kinja? I'm looking for a way to go to one site and read blogs that have been recently updated.
- As for changes to this blog, I've added a site meter (to verify that there are about five people who read this site). Also I've changed the comment option so that I don't have to approve everything before it gets posted.

Chicago

Chicago is AMAZING. I was excited to be going anywhere, but especially a big city like Chicago. There are two things you notice when you fly in to Chicago: Lake Michigan, which looks more like an ocean, and the buildings. It’s hard to contemplate how tall even one of those buildings is, and in downtown Chicago they're everywhere, building after building, as tall as mountains.

We (a large group of relatives and I) and I had only two days to spend in Chicago after my cousin's wedding in South Bend, so we had to choose our activities wisely. Sears Tower and Wrigley Field sounded cool, as did the aquarium and the natural history museum. But for me there was really only one must-do on my list: go to Harpo Studios where the Oprah Winfrey Show is taped. I mean, I watch the show every day, and after that I read O magazine, and watch my Oprah’s 20th Anniversary DVD…well, you know what I mean. How could I go to Chicago and not visit Oprah?

But Harpo Studios seemed out for the first day, since we got there in late afternoon and the family had made plans to go to Navy Pier.

Below, the view of Downtown from Navy Pier.

After that my dad and my sister and I went walking on our own down Michigan Avenue. The stores on Michigan Avenue (aka the Magnificent Mile) are world-famous, they’re huge, and the lit-up window displays are fantastically stylish: Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, Louis Vuitton, Saks Fifth Avenue, a huge Borders store. It seemed like every store I could ever imagine wanting to go into was there, selling anything I could ever want. I had never seen stores like these--well, only on TV and in movies.

But my eyes lit up most at the Ghirardelli chocolate store, which turned out to be right across the street from the Hershey’s store. Ah, I had stumbled across the chocolate corner of Chicago. It turned out that the Ghirardelli store sells chocolate, of course, but it’s also an ice cream parlor selling the most delicious-looking chocolate sundaes I’ve ever seen. Too bad I was so full from dinner that I couldn’t even contemplate eating one. An employee was handing out samples of dark chocolate with caramel filling, so I munched on that instead. The place was packed, and we waited in a long line for my dad to order a strawberry malt (who orders a strawberry malt in the Ghirardelli chocolate store? Go figure). Besides being packed, the store was heated to the point that the chocolate started melting in my hand.

As we stood around waiting for our order, I glanced around the store. The employees were making sundaes behind a wooden counter in an extremely efficient manner. I looked at the couple in front of us, the woman carrying a baby in one of those Baby Bjorn contraptions. There was a small area of tables in front that was completely full with people laughing and talking in the very warm store. And something hit me. These people aren’t tourists--they’re just ordinary Chicagoans out for some ice cream on a Sunday night. They can go down to Michigan Avenue anytime they like. Instead of the neighborhood Baskin-Robbins, they go to the Ghirardelli store on Michigan Avenue. Wow. Just one of the benefits of living in a world-class city.

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After a night’s rest, I woke up determined to see Harpo Studios. My father and my sister and I took a cab ride through the city and arrived in a nice neighborhood at what turns out to be a rather non-descript building. It wasn't what I expected. Surprisingly to me, it’s not a tourist destination—there’s not even a gift shop inside. But still, I was *so* excited thinking about Oprah Winfrey herself walking down the same sidewalks and possibly inside working on her next show. There was a guy in a ticket booth in the entryway who gave me a card so you can call for tickets to a show. Outside, I took pictures in front of the sign and my jaw dropped when I recognized the parking lost where Oprah gave away cars to the entire audience. Here's a picture of me and my sister at Harpo. Check out my smile of pure joy:

I suppose the real highlight of the visit came when I spotted two Harpo employees standing outside smoking cigarettes. I tried to make small talk with them. They seemed nice enough, not too annoyed by me the super-fan. We ended up talking about the weather, but they had to go back inside before I got to ask them what I really wanted to know, things more along the lines of “What is Oprah really like?” But at least I can say I met some people who know Oprah, which is quite possibly the closest I’ll ever come to actually meeting her.

My mission accomplished, we headed to Millennium Park, which has the Cloud Gate sculpture, basically a bean-shaped mirror sculpture. The underside is particularly fascinating. You can see different views of the people around you, sort of like looking at different camera views: one far up overhead, one close up, and one that looks like everyone’s mashed-up together. Very post-modern. I loved Millennium Park, so much so that I took about a million pictures of it:

This is the amphitheater at Millennium Park:

*Sigh* I think I’m in love. Obviously, I was very impressed by my day and night in Chicago, to the point where I sat in the hotel Sunday night and contemplated packing up my things and moving there. Seriously. It didn’t seem like much of a stretch to see myself occupying some tiny apartment, walking to the El station in my wool coat and leather boots, having lunch at one of those hot dog stands, strolling through Millennium Park on weekends. There must be tons of stuff to do in Chicago, sports events and concerts and museums to visit, great shopping, restaurants to try, but honestly, those things don’t even appeal to me that much. Even walking down the street is exciting in Chicago. Just being there right in the middle of so much energy, absorbing it all, must make you think differently about yourself. Like you’re a citizen of the world, you're able to shape your own destiny in a place where just about anything can happen.

The trip was way too short. It was difficult heading back to El Paso so soon, knowing that world is out there. As much as I love this city, it’s no Chicago. Our attempts at sophistication seem quaint in comparison. El Paso’s Downtown has about two tall buildings, neither of which is really that tall. There’s no El train, there aren’t people from every nation in the world walking down the street, there’s no Ghirardelli chocolate store. I do love El Paso and I normally hate when people are down on the city and whine about how “there’s nothing to do here,” but going to a city like Chicago I can understand why they say that, and I can understand why so many young people leave El Paso in search of bigger and better things. It just made me realize more so than ever that El Paso is not the center of the universe. But I guess that’s why people travel, to gain perspective, which I definitely did.

According to this article, "A poll conducted for the Wright Institute found that 91 percent of us have a soft addiction that keeps us from feeling satisfied," a soft addiction being "ordinary behavior that, if overdone, can wreak havoc on your life." Soft addictions include procrastination, watching too much TV, overeating, and surfing the Internet excessively. I'm thinking a soft addiction is actually a harsh-sounding name for a bad habit.

Internet access has been limited lately. Somehow everyone in my family is now home during the day and we all share one computer, so I haven't had the opportunity to come up with my usual output of amusing posts. Things I've made a mental note to post about in the past few days:
- Woo hoo, Florida won!
- This book sounds kind of interesting. Not that I haven't read all this before, but from the description it sounds like it does a good job summing up what I and a lot of people I know are going through.
- kiva.org deserves a mention. What a cool way to donate money.

I picked the final two

Currently ranked No. 16 on El Paso Times Bracket Mania. We'll see where I am tomorrow if Florida wins as I predict them to.