Keeping me awake

I had to wake up at 4:45 this morning for work.  Fortunately, the internet provided me with this gem, which is quite literally making me laugh out loud.

http://hungoverowls.tumblr.com/

NOT SAFE FOR PARENT'S EYES (y'all, my parents read my blog).  There are a lot of "f" words, if you know what I'm saying.

“I’m going to need a fistful of aspirin before you open your goddamn mouth again.”

Things on my mind

Whenever I hear about someone dying, I think to myself "that will be me someday" but then I kind of talk myself out of it and convince myself it's not true.

Inspiration board

I seriously cannot get enough of rooms with bookshelves and other lovely things.  I need to make a bookshelves inspiration board for sure.

I make the best pen-pal

This is a real life verbatim email I sent to one of my dearest friends this morning, which pretty much sums up everything on my mind:

hi friend!!

 

tomorrow is my ischool orientation and i'm so excited! only i can't decide what i want to wear. it needs to say "i'm serious" and "i'm fun!" and "i have a good sense of style" and "it's 100 degrees outside" all at once. i want to wear my glasses because they're cute and nerdy, but they have a terrible habit of falling off my face during times of excessive heat (read: all the time).  also: i have to spend all night putting together approximately a half dozen different schedules so i can be prepared when i meet my advisor. do you think that's too many? 

 

you are the only one who can understand my mixed feelings!  i miss you, i wish we could drink beers on my couch.

-rebecca

Needless to say, she replied with enthusiasm.

Dropping the balls

Really, I haven't posted since Tuesday?  You know, this is just a fun little way to occupy a few minutes of my time each week and I'm not going to beat myself for not keeping up exactly with this little "challenge."  But I do note how sucky I am.

I'm at work where the computer is slow and I'm supposed to post some music I've been enjoying lately.  Here is where I have an embarassing admission: despite my Radiohead tattoo and the years of my adolesence spent pining over this or that band, I don't really listen to music anymore.  I've always considered music to be a fairly private thing for me; I don't like listening to "my" music in the presence of anyone else and since I started living with Ed, I have very little alone time.  Though Ed and I do share some musical tastes, the kind of music I like is weird and as such, I like to keep it a little private.  Most of the time spent in the car or on the bus is filled with the noise of podcasts.  Like every other college educated under-30 year-old, I listen to This American Life fairly exclusively.  Every once in a while, I'll tune into NYC Radiolab or a Ted Talk.  They're good stuff.

But anyways, music.  Once I'm in on a band, I'm pretty much a devoted fan for life (hence the Radiohead tattoo).  I enjoyed The Decemberists in high school and early college, but there was only so much sea shanty I could take in any one sitting.  And then I met Ed.  Ed, a wonderful fellow ex-emo introvert who introduced me to some good stuff.  Like Tarkio, Colin Meloy's (the lead singer of The Decemberists) band from college.  I cannot get enough of their music and it's been a good 2 years since we've been formally introduced.  Here's my favorite tune, I hope you enjoy:

On not eating enough

There's a blog I follow and the writer's first book is called No One Cares What You Had For Lunch and is about how to start up a successful money-making blog.  This isn't that and in keeping with the challenge,  Day Nine implores me to describe today's food consumption.  I put off writing this because I don't eat enough during the day.  Call it frugality or laziness or being too busy, but my body has learned to subsist off few calories.  Case in point:

1. This morning I ate a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds with skim milk for breakfast.
2. After my morning work out, I had some frozen grapes.
3. Some evil woman brought almost-stale Starbucks cookies for the front desk employees and I ate one, even though they had something like 400 calories and 7 grams of saturated fat.  I mean, come on, free cookies!
4. Upon returning home, I had my leftover nachos from last night's weekly night out to El Arroyo.
5. For dinner, Ed made some tasty spicy chicken patties on whole wheat bun.  I only had half of it but I did have two generous servings of salad with Brianna's "New American" salad dressing.

I hope dessert comes soon in the form of cinnamon sugar toast.

This has to be one of the loveliest things I've ever seen:

And then I spit them right out

Does any other child of the 90s remember the suggestive toy "Mr. Bucket?"  It was basically a motorized bucket on wheels that came with balls of different colors and each person would be assigned to a color, put the balls in Mr. Bucket's "mouth" and then Mr. Bucket would spit them out again.  I don't know the purpose of this game.  We were too old to actually play the game, but the commercials for it came on Nickelodeon all the time.  I still remember the lyrics, too: "Mr. Bucket, you put the balls in my mouth.  I'm Mr. Bucket, and then I spit them right out."  I really think that whoever writes lyrics to songs that advertise children's toys really get off on making them sexually suggestive.

This digression is all to say that today's challenge is to Create a Bucket List.  This is something that I've thought about recently, when trying to figure out where I want my life to go and what's important to me.  I'm going to try to make goals that are not career-driven because I think people of this culture invest too much of their identity in how they spend their 9-5s.  So, before I'm 30,

• I want to write a book.  Probably when I get my PhD, but who knows.
• I want to finish the short story I've been working on forever.
• I want to step foot on every continent, including Antarctica.
• I want to hold a conversation in Spanish with a native Spanish speaker.
• I want all of my household's produce and eggs to come from my own backyard.
• I want to see a sunset from each of the 7 Wonders.
• I want to do one thing a year that terrifies me.

What do you want to do before your next big milestone?

Crushes

The directions for Day Six made no sense to me, so I'm skipping it.  It's my blog and I can cheat if I want to.

I have been looking forward to Day Seven: Post pictures of 5 celebrity crushes since this sucker began.

1: Joseph Gordon-Levitt.  Just a little scruff, cleans up well, brooding, mysterious, and is rumored to be playing the villain in the next Batman movie.  If I had any idea the squirrelly kid in 3rd Rock would turn into this, I would've watched it much more.

2: Shia LaBeouf.  I know, I know but this magazine cover changed my life.  Drunk driving incidences aside, this is one attractive guy.  I might have a thing for teen TV stars-turned-attractive-20-somethings. 

Also: scruffy guys in suits.

3: Mark Walhberg.  He's talented, he's been in some of my favorite movies, and he doesn't take himself too seriously, which is good for a guy who started his career by dropping his pants on stage.

4: Leonardo DiCaprio.  He's had my heart since he told Rose that he'd never let go, and he's yet to release it.

5: Don Draper.  He's not real, I know.  But what's not to love about him?  I mean besides that he's an alcoholic, womanizer, and addicted to his job.

Suits? I'm noticing a trend.

Day Five!

Ok, better mood this morning.  Sometimes you have just have to fall asleep and hit the restart button.

So Ed and I have become amateur foodies since living together.  We definitely don't have the budget to eat out like we could in college but we still love great tasting food.  We can't afford high quality items, but we want food that tastes, you know, like food.  We're addicted to salt and fat (like most mammals), but since Ed's been training for long-distance runs and I found out about my high cholesterol, we're much more conscious about what we're putting in our bodies.  We're big meat eaters, but I've become more and more invested in food politics and won't eat meat that's been inhumanely treated and pumped with antibiotics, stimulants, or hormones.  All of these factors contribute largely to having to be really specific with weekly food planning, looking for lots of deals at the grocery store, and finding healthy, local food buying options.  Our biggest resource by far has been the best recipe website ever: www.cheaphealthygood.blogspot.com.  Go there, go there now.

So, my Day Five: Share your favorite recipe comes, of course, from this online Mecca of delicious, affordable, quick, healthy meals.  Each one can easily be prepared in under 30 minutes, tastes great and uses few ingredients.  This butternut squash risotto is no exception.  It has everything we're looking for in a recipe: it's quick, it uses only a few ingredients, you can use whatever squash is in season, and it makes LOTS of leftovers (something that is very desirable for us, since we eat all 3 meals at home).  My favorite part, though?  It proved to Ed that something vegetarian can be filling and nutritious.  Win for the ex-veggie!

I could seriously go on for hours about this website, so I'll leave you with just a few more recipes to whet your  Cheap Healthy Good appetite.
Pasta, turkey sausage, broccoli rabe.
Polenta, swiss chard, and pancetta. (The polenta can be tricky.)
Healthy tex-mex!

Go, eat well!

Suck

I'm in a terrible mood and taking it out on all the wrong people.

The "challenge" will resume tomorrow, god willing.

Say cheese

Day Four is "Show your teeth! Post a self-portrait."  Typically, self-portraits are statements about how the subject views herself as an object.  However, I started work today and have to make fajitas, so here is what I came up with:

Just a little snarky, you know me. Also, no teeth.

You know, when I look in the mirror I don't love my haircut, but I got a lot of compliments on it today and I think I'm kinda rocking it in this picture.  Dearest readers, to keep [the short 'do] or not to keep?

Day two/three

Ack, late already!  And when you read the topic of Day Two: Make a bulleted list of everything you did today, you'll see I had no good excuse.

• Woke up, read on the patio.
• Planned the weekly menu with Ed
• Grocery shopped
• 30 Rock'ed and Terminator'ed (two TV shows we watch on Instantly Watch) for way longer than we should've
• Ate dinner with Rachel at Chuys
• Hung out with Rachel

My days are so exciting!

Ok, on to Day Three: Share your favorite song lyric/quote, and we'll pretend that I was never late!
I have two, really, that are both in the works to becoming tattoos.  "Here I'm allowed everything all of the time" from Radiohead's Idioteque off Kid A.  Next, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" which is loosely translated as "Don't let the bastards get you down".  It appears in the latin form in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, MY FAVORITE BOOK OF ALL TIME, and also conveniently appears in one of my favorite songs of all time, "Neopolitan Bridesmaid" by Tarkio.

And there, more information than you needed.