Better than fruit salad

CURRENT OBESSSION

Bento boxes. I think the idea of a compartmented, healthy lunch is just too irresistible, which is kind of the point obviously. But I think the other point is just the prospect of having cute food. While it rings a little too “50’s housewife” for me to picture some happy Japanese marm preparing everyone’s bento in the morning (pack your own damn lunch, as my mother would say,) I am definitely down with having lunch time be a happy thing to look forward to. Here are some images to spark your obsession.

There seems to be a leit motif of Asian here at chez moi: a few days ago we ordered a quality Go set, so that we can truly become enlightened, nerdy beings, from the same website that has the tea thermos I covet so strongly. And now the bento boxes. Weirdly uncharacteristic, as most of my “cross culture” internet findings are French cooking websites.

PEOPLE I HAVE A SORT OF CELEBRITIY CRUSH ON

1. Pat Douggins, NPR news reporter from Orlando. He has a really neat timbre in his voice. Whenever we hear about NASA-related things, we get to hear from him and it makes me really happy.

2. Garrison Keillor.

3. Maggie Gyllenhaal, particularly the version of her we saw in Stranger Than Fiction.

4. Audry Hepburn. Who DOESN’T have a celebrity crush on Ms. Hepburn?

5. Edward R. Murrow.

It’s Christmas Season, were you aware? It really is this time. I haven’t really done much I the area of edible treats aside from make a killer batch of ginger snaps, but I have put up decorations, and put up a fake tree.

I am not really down with fake trees, because I grew up with a family who did real trees up until I was about 17, and we gave my Mom tons of crap for buying in on something as faddish as a fake plastic tree. There is no smell to a fake plastic tree. Half the point of big time nostalgic holidays like Christmas is to have cookies baking, buckeyes cooling on wax paper, eggnog* cooling in a mug, café au lait cooling in other mugs, and sticking your face near the big spruce or fir and getting a great big whiff.

*I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: eggnog must be heated, cut in half with milk, and topped with a little nutmeg. It is. The only way. Drinking it cold is vile, stupid, and potentially deadly. I think this year I will try it with a little rum as well.

Of coruse, fake plastic trees are much better than CUTTING DOWN FORESTS TO HAVE EVERYONE HOUSE A SINGLE TREE FOR 23 DAYS JUST TO THEN THROW THEM AWAY, but they do raise trees for the entire purpose of being Christmas trees, so I’m pretty sure Christmas deforestation isn’t a major concern anymore. The best idea, which I heard on the radio last Saturday, would be to buy a tree from a nursery that you intended on planting in your yard or in the wilderness somewhere. You can keep it in the house for all the Christmas needs, than put it out on the north side of your house outside for the rest of Winter and go plant it in Spring or when the ground thaws. Awesome idea, and one that I would like to participate in when I have a little more cash to buy a proper tree.

As it stands, I did not have cash for a proper tree, real or otherwise. I had even toyed with the idea to sticking some Christmas lights in one of my larger houseplants, just to quench my thirst for the complete Christmas décor and to avoid buying an expensive fake plastic tree, but it wasn’t working. I sheepishly went to Target, and actually found a scraggily 6ft. for about 12 bucks. Not bad at ALL. The tree is sort of sad and ghetto looking all by itself, but once I strung some popcorn up into a garland and draped some paper-clips chains, I’ll be damned if the tree doesn’t look festive.

Now I just have to finish my papers and clean my house. For the end of finals week and my Mom coming to visit, respectively.

Here is a picture I drew at work yesterday.

CONFESSION

I get into this phase where I cannot stop looking at hipster kid’s live journal communities. All of them are whack but the greatest ones are about hair.

This particular one I am obsessed with claims to sort of revolves around hair advice…should I get this hair cut, how about this color, what product is best, and so forth. However, posts of this nature are usually shot down and flamed by other members of the community, as it does not focus on what the community is truly about: Hipster kids dressing up and taking pictures of themselves.

Many of these pictures, you will notice, do not actually focus on the hair. The hair is sometimes not even fully apparent in the pictures, but rather cut off by the hold-the-camera-towards-yourself method of taking the picture.

There is occasionally, I suppose, a glimmer of the “advice” this community boasts about, in the form of cutting remarks that degrade the more normal people who occasionally post in ernest. There are countless comments about how maybe you should get an a-line haircut, or poof out your head for a rocker mullet, or maybe you need to consider dying half of your head platinum blond and the other half hot pink.

I feel compelled to stress that I don’t really go to these websites to feel smug about anything (because, about what exactly?) but it’s a simple, burning fascination. It’s like going to the zoo. Or watching someone take apart a computer, or car engine. Or craning to see a train wreck. You can’t help yourself. It’s not really “good” or “bad,” necessarily. Merely unavoidable. If you will.

“How do I get my hair like this?”

Astounding.

TWO THINGS I JUST LEARNED THAT PROBABLY DOESN’T MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU, BUT I’M ALL GIDDY AND HAVE NO ONE TO TELL — PITY ANTHONY WHO WILL SOON STOP BY AND HEAR THE LONGER VERSION SUPPLEMENTED BY DIAGRAMS.

1. A gerund, like a participial phrase, is a verbal construction. However, whereas the participial phrase generally deals with modification, having both adjectival and adverbial functions, a gerund has a NOMINAL function — it can function as a subject, as an object, a compliment, etc.

2. An infinitive phrase is also a verbal construction, but it mostly deals with, well, infinitives. Often we are dealing with marked infinitives (as in “to go,” “to eat,” etc.) but either marked or unmarked infinitives may appear on the final. Infinitive phrases can have both a nominal function and may function as modifiers, but I could be wrong there. I need to double check my notes.

This is huge. These two items above had myself and several other people from class waving our arms around like noodles for the incomprehensible explanation we received from our professor, but post study-session I think I’ve got it down. Now I just have to commit it to memory.

Hi. It’s not even finals week yet and I’ve already been brought to tears at the amount of stuff I must not only do but EXCELL at. The penultimate week of the semester. The time when all the slackers and nerds and truly-interested-but-just-not-that-good-at-doing-noticeably-well-for-some-reason students such as myself gather our flotsam of notes and doodles and bring them to our professors during their office hours and prostrate ourselves on the book-coated floors and beseech them to pass us in their classes. I had the weird experience of being incredibly happy for a friend of mine who seems to have hooked up with another friend in my poetry class (as well they should,) and not five minutes later freaking out with the aforementioned tears for not being able to tell whether or not the sentence Anthony was showing me had a dangling modifier. I should know this stuff! It’s why I wanted to be an English major in the first place! I composed myself but also made a messy spectacle of my grim outlook of the overall semester, and didn’t really do a compelling job of calming down. I was sort of mopey all through my biology lab. I came home and showered, which made me feel better in a weird, virtuous, clean human sort of way, and then we went out to Texas Roadhouse, because unlimited pillow-biscuits make everything better. And post grammar study session I am a slightly better student.

Tonight I was at the mall getting some hair doohickies, and as I was leaving I noticed Santa Claus getting into a white Focus a few spaces down from me. There was someone in the passenger seat, but I couldn’t see who it was. Santa didn’t have a bag or anything, nor did he have any gaudy novelty key chains.

When I haven’t been thinking of the function of sentence elements, or dinosaur-shaped buildings, or taking a vacation from context, I’ve been having some pretty whacky dreams. Last night’s involved two church buildings, connected by a hallway that somehow turned into a field (lots of warm purples and oranges, a color scheme I’ve had in a previous dream actually — also the landscape I accompanied with the other-other world of the Mulefa,) and that was filled with dinosaurs. And jets that were a sort of mix between a B-2 and a box kite. Someone made a toilet out of ice and it melted.

My printer isn’t working, despite my pleading and my scarping together change to replace the empty ink cartridge. So, I guess I better go fix that.