So, this time last year, I said I was going to do all of my Holiday shopping online. Goal accomplished! Go me!
Archive for November, 2010
Top Ten Christmas Wish List
If you’re looking for ideas for my Christmas list, here are my top ten wishes:
- A carpet/upholstery cleaner (but I think my parents have that covered)
- An iPhone compatible with Verizon (yes, I can wait until January, but you should pre-order)
- Cash
- Mean Girls and Parenthood on DVD
- A gift certificate to Victoria’s Secret (hey, I wear their outerwear, too), Macy’s, or Target (I’m fancy, huh?)
- A trip to Disneyland
- A trip to London
- A trip to New York
- Diamond stud earrings in white gold
- For everyone to see my uncle’s movie, The Fighter
BBC Book List
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.
Instructions: Copy this. Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. Send to other book nerds.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House- Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited- Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Top Ten Tuesday
For this Top Ten Tuesday, I’ve decided to make the “soundtrack of my life.” So, here it is, in order of birth:
- Magnet and Steel by Walter Egan
- Girls Just Want to Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper
- Vogue by Madonna
- Sweet Child o’ Mine by Guns ‘n’ Roses
- Canon in D by Pachelbel
- Come Calling (Her Song) by The Cowboy Junkies
- She Talks to Angels by The Black Crows
- Songbird by Fleetwood Mac
- Bleecker Street by Simon & Garfunkle
- You’ve Got the Love by Florence and the Machine
15 Authors in 15 Minutes
This is a list of the most influential writers in my life, in no particular order:
- Dr. Seuss
- Shakespeare
- Virginia Wolff
- John Steinbeck
- William Faulkner
- Adrienne Rich
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Toni Morrison
- Stevie Smith
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Frederico Garcia Lorca
- Geoffrey Chaucer
- Emily Bronte
- Thomas Hardy
- Arthur Miller
Who is on your list?
Makin’ Love with Voldemort
Last night, I had a dream that I was making out with Ralph Fiennes and he turned into Voldemort in the middle of the session. I have never read nor seen anything Harry Potter, but of course I know what all of the movie characters look like, and Voldemort is SCARY. I mean, he full-on turned into the corpse-colored dude with SCARY teeth and a SCARY no-nose. Everything sort of went gray and cold around me, and I jerked awake from the fright, only to find myself sweating from the terror. Yeah, it sounds funny when I describe it, but I was genuinely scared.
In other news, it’s Friday! Yay! Bon weekend, everyone.
Happy Veteran’s Day
This Veteran’s day, I’d like to honor my grandfather Eugene Johnson, who was a POW during WWII. Typically, “he was never the same” when he came back from the war, but I just always knew him as my Grandpa, whom I loved. I won’t glorify it or anything–he was an alcoholic with his own issues–but as a kid, I didn’t know the difference. He lived in San Diego for most of my childhood, and I always looked forward to his visits. What I remember the most, though, was the last time I saw him alive. He was in the hospital, intubated and on some serious sedatives. But when my mom told him I was there, he opened his eyes widely and smiled a huge, tubey smile. I will never forget that image.
Cheers to you, Grandpa Gene, and your fetes and follies. Happy Veteran’s Day.
Friends Rock!
I am thankful for my friends. Despite my craziness, they love me for some reason. Though I tend to talk about certain things, like my love life, with some more than others, I know I can call any of them with a broken heart or the future “He proposed!” and they would all be equally happy for me. I am blessed with Shelly’s enduring love; Claudia’s unending support; Theresa’s clairvoyant insight; CKD’s humor and advice; Amy’s inspiration and achievements; Lili’s beauty in friendship and in life; Elizabeth’s common struggles; Katie’s sick sense of humor and selfless support; Katy’s radical acceptance; Phil’s ability to conceive my emotions; Nate’s creativity in solving problems; John’s daily wisdom; and Phil II’s everything. There are many more, but these are the people who have made the biggest imprint on my life in a positive way. I love them with all that I have and am ineffably happy that they are a part of my life.
Florence and the Machine
I went to see Florence and the Machine on Friday, November 5th at the Fox Theatre in Oakland. I had a blast. She had two opening bands, Hanni El Khatib and Grouplove. Hanni El Khatib I could have taken or left, but I totally dug Grouplove. They kind of reminded me a a new, more modern and relevant B-52s, and definitely just as fun. I was jammin’. Florence herself was unearthly. She wore a typical Florence flowy dress, making her look as ethereal as ever. Her voice was strong, and she hit both the high and low notes with aplomb. My only complaint is that she didn’t play “Hurricane Drunk,” one of my favorite songs, but her set list did include:
- Drumming Song
- My Boy Builds Coffins
- Cosmic Love
- Girl with One Eye
- Ghosts
- Between Two Lungs
- Strangeness and Charm
- Howl
- You’ve Got the Love
- Rabbit Heart
- Kiss with a Fist
- Heavy in Your Arms
- Dog Days Are Over
Next time Flo comes around, I strongly suggest you see her!
I Hate Passive-Aggressive People
Why can’t people just say what they mean and mean what they say? Yes, I believe in relying on intuition in some cases, but, for example, if a friend says, “I won’t be offended if you don’t come to the party,” I’m going to take that friend at his or her word. So why the fuck would that friend get mad at my not coming to the party and hold on to that grudge for OVER A YEAR if that friend said in the FIRST place that she wouldn’t be offended if I didn’t make it to the event? Said friend says I should have used my intuition to know that she REALLY wanted me there. But if YOU say it’s not a problem, I’m going to believe you. I’m not going to buy into passive-aggressive bullshit, because I believe people should be DIRECT with their communication. So much gets misconstrued and so many feelings get hurt in passive-aggression, not to mention that it is annoying as fuck, that I want to cut those douchebags who use passive-aggressive communication. Man up and say what you mean, bitches.
