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Tuesday, 22 September 2009
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Currently
The Whimsical Christian: 18 Essays
By Dorothy L. Sayers
see relatedGet branded!
GET BRANDED!
I got that idea from Sarah Evans, one of the names behind namechk.com.
The idea behind namechk? It's a Web site that checks to see if your username still is available at dozens of popular social networking Web sites.
"Promote your brand consistently by registering a username that is still available on the majority of the most popular sites," according to the site.
Because your username is your social media identity is your brand. Plus, one consistent username will make me easy to find on any social networking site.
Just look for mcemilywrites.
Add me at my new MySpace address. Friend me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter. And look for me on any other social networking site you generally use. (Any others I should be using?) (I'll probably also be moving my blog and -- gasp! -- actually blogging again on Blogger in the new future. I may need some design help, if anyone's feeling up to the challenge. Come on... you know you miss me!)
And, while you're at it, let me know what you think of the "brand." Too informal? Too unoriginal? Or just right?
Sunday, 07 September 2008
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Currently Reading
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
By Rachel Cohn, David Levithan
see related25.
25 is a square number, being 5² = 5 × 5.
25 is the smallest square that is also a sum of two squares: 25 = 3² + 4².
25 is a centered octagonal number and an automorphic number.
25 is the smallest base 10 Friedman number as it can be expressed by its own numbers: 5².
11:25 is a magic number. I have no idea what that means either.
25 is how old I turned at noon Friday.
Next weekend, I'm moving to Chicago's Ukrainian Village, and, while spending much of my birthday weekend packing, I ran across a stack of old diaries I kept as a little girl with flowers and teddy bears on their covers and gold locks and red ribbons holding them closed. The oldest begins Tuesday, Dec. 26, 1989. I would have been 6 years old and in kindergarten then.
I tried to look up how I celebrated my 7th birthday, but unfortunately I only journaled through May, with an epilogue in October -- I kid you not -- to update my future readers on the first grade. I did, however, write about my half-birthday on March 5, 1990. Because as we all know, 6 1/2 is a huge milestone in a young girl's life.
With a shaky, kindergarten grasp of capitalization and punctuation, I wrote:It WAS MY 1/2 BrithDAY It WAS PUlASKi DAY I HAD NO SchOOL it RAND & SnOWD. Um - Um No More HAPPY 1/2 BrithDAY ThAts All.
In other entries I wrote about how I got a haircut with a fluff and my little sister Annie got a haircut and Dad got The Land Before Time. I listed all the books my dad read with me as bedtime stories: books about Louis Pasteur, Elizabeth Blackwell and Louisa May Alcott. Books with titles like Babe Ruth: Home Run Hero and Amelia Earhart: Adventure in the Sky. All biographies. I watched The Wizard of OZ -- at the end of it, they showed how they made it -- and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade -- my favorite part was when the dad was shooting at an airplane at the bad guys and he shot the tail off the airplane and he told Indiana Jones that the bad guys did it. I counted down the days to something evidently monumental called "the 100s Party" at school. I played in the deep deep deep deep deep snow, and, boy, was there lots.
I ended every entry with "That's all."
Sometimes, I even illustrated my adventures:
This stuff is GOLD!
But my favorite entry of all is dated Friday, Jan. 26, 1990:iT WAS DANAS PATTY & At SchOOL JoN SeeMeD TO LiKe Me. Oh AND DiD You NoW DANA iS 7? & I HearD JoN TlAKiNg ABout Me To ALL The BoYS. THATS ALL.
That pretty much sounds like how I've summed up every party I've ever attended ever. Isn't it weird how much of you is already you from such an early age? Some things, whether you are 6 or 25, really do never change.
That's all.
Monday, 30 June 2008
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Currently Reading
On the Road (Penguin Classics)
By Jack Kerouac
see relatedYour summer reading list
According to this meme that's been making its way around The InterWebs, "The Big Read reckons the average adult has read only six of the top 100 books it's printed." I've read almost a quarter of the books listed below (yes, I really read Moby Dick all the way through, and yes, it's brilliant), and I just started On the Road (so far, also brilliant: "... The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'").
You? Any books I should definitely move to my "intend to read" list?
1. Bold the books you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE.
4. Star next to the books you're reading/have read some of.
5. Copy, paste and repeat.
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 Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller'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 - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwel
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 Night-time - Mark Haddon
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' 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 - EB 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
Thursday, 29 May 2008
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Currently Reading
The Great Divorce
By C. S. Lewis
see relatedThe Car Crash Story
ME: Did you listen to the song yet so I can tell you my story?
GRACE: yes
ME: OK
ME: So I was in a car accident yesterday
GRACE: what?
The spectacular three-car pile-up was the weekend before Memorial Day weekend in Springfield; my IM conversation with Grace, that Monday at work in Chicagoland.
OK, so you're not really supposed to converse about the details of a car accident with anyone other than the police and your insurance agent. But I don't really remember the details: One minute I was stopping behind a car at a stoplight. The next, I was crashing into it. And in the week-or-so since, the more I'm able to unravel the 120 threads that immediately began spooling in my thoughts, the more The Car Crash Story has become slightly less tragic and actually a little hilarious. That's grace.
At the time, the whole thing was just incredibly disorienting because (1) I didn't realize I was crashing and (2) I took a real wallop when I did because I drive a tiny Volkswagen Bug. I crashed, and then I was face to the steering wheel, seatbelt wrapped around my neck, my car filling with smoke, trying to figure out what just happened. Actually, I believe my first thought was, "Something ... something ... time machine ... WHAT IS THIS WHITE THING, AND HOW DID IT GET IN MY CAR?!!"
The white thing was the passenger-side airbag.
It took me a while to figure that out through the smoke and the gratuitous amount of chalky dust the airbag shot into my face, shrouding everything inside my car in a blanket of white. Which made me pretty sure for a fleeting second that I was dead. I'm dying and I'm dead. I've died. Which should make you think of C.S. Lewis' The Great Divorce, because that's what being pretty sure I was dead made me think of. That, and how much I hate buses and what "shining figure" I knew in life would come to pick me up at the bus stop and accompany me to heaven proper. (This is where a working knowledge of the book's plot may come in handy.)
That figure apparently would be my friend Lewis, who is an incredibly talented musician. I'd just uploaded a bunch of music from his new Web site onto my iPod before my long drive down to Springfield ...
ME: And then what comes up on my iPod's shuffle, but this song
ME: And I'm like, "Lewis? Lewis is coming to take me to heaven?"
ME: ME: "Of everyone that I met during my lifetime, JOEL'S ROOMMATE is the one that comes to take me to heaven? REALLY, GOD?!!"
ME: Then my car started making a hissing noise and I realized I was still alive and jumped out. The End.
ME: wow
ME: When you die, Lewis comes to take you to heaven
Outside the car, I had a fleeting moment of excitement when it occurred to me I had SINGLE-HANDEDLY SHUT DOWN INTERSTATE 55 (allegedly). Until I realized that was NOT A GOOD THING.
It didn't take long for police to arrive on the scene. Then a fire truck. And an ambulance. AND, because Springfield is such a small town, everybody's families. And one of the fireman was the brother of a girl in my high school class. Really small town. Both my parents, my sister Annie and her longtime ... um, "man friend" Brian all closed ranks around me, apparently looking very small and scared and sore and even more like a 16-year-old than usual in the midst of the commotion I'd caused (allegedly ... I'm a reporter; I write this stuff in police reports every day).
After everybody else drove off and my smushed Bug was towed away, my dad took me to rent a car so I could drive back to Chicagoland that night. Apparently, in all of Springfield, there were only three cars for rent: a Cadillac, a Ford Explorer and a Dodge Magnum, which seemed like the smallest and least gas-guzzling of the options.
In reality, this thing is a hearse. There is no earthly reason to drive a car this big and black that does not involve transporting bodies. It is so long, it literally hangs out past any sports utility vehicle, minivan or pickup truck parked in a lot. Every spot in this car is a blind spot. Also, it has Michigan license plates. Michigan plates beginning in "B-E-D" and ending in a random series of numbers. I think my mom even may have teared up when she saw me behind the wheel, even smaller and more scared and looking like it was my first day with a driver's license.
But the worst part of the car accident is that now everybody thinks I am from Michigan, and I am a sleepy Michiganer ... Michiganite ... Michiganian ... ?
GRACE: i feel like your life is like that movie... across the universe
GRACE: that's what i imagine your life to be like
ME: LOL
ME: Why?
ME: Because I do a lot of drugs and randomly burst into song?
ME: Or how am I supposed to interpret that?
GRACE: just
GRACE: that your life is set to song
GRACE: and i imagine lots of swirly colors around
GRACE: and it's trippy music
GRACE: not justin timberlake
GRACE: lol
Saturday, 17 May 2008
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Quote of the week
Jen wins this one.
The scene: We went out for drinks Thursday to discuss her quickly-approaching bachelorette party, which I, as her unofficial matron of honor, am attempting to help plan. To our left, an older gentleman, sitting by himself, generally bothering the bartendresses and sending back his appetizer orders repeatedly. To our right, a pair of men about our age, one in a suit and the other in an ill-considered Pac-Man T shirt, who continued to stare extremely obviously at us throughout the night.
"Don't worry," Jen said. "If they come over here, we'll just flash them our ring fingers."
Her ring finger is, of course, sparkling with diamonds. Mine is stamped "True Love Waits."
Honestly, the ring seemed like a good idea when I was 18 and attending a Lutheran high school. Now it's just cheesy and slightly embarassing, but it's too noticeable after six years to ditch without everyone thinking I've changed my mind about that whole "waiting" thing. I haven't, but I'm not sure if that fact or the wedding-looking ring on my finger was meant to repel Pac-Man and Co.
This apparently just occured to Jen as the words left her mouth. And here comes our quote of the week:
"Hey, is that a 'True Love Waits' ring? Can I see it? I've heard they exist, but I've never actually seen one before."
And just like that, I became a mythical creature. The mythical, still-slightly-cheesy, 24-year-old virgin, wearer of The One Ring.
Also, yes, I am the matron of honor. Not maid. Meaning I'm going to have to get married in the next four weeks or I'm going to be seriously shirking my responsibilities at Jen's wedding.
peachjolyranchr
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- Name: Emily Mc
- Country: United States
- State: Illinois
- Metro: Chicago
- Gender: Female
- Member Since: 5/21/2004
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