stuff

clearly my long-held, top-secret ambition to be a brilliant, charming, witty, published author, needs to be put on the shelf for awhile. why, you ask? because apparantly i have completely forgotten how to write. along with me temporary abandonment of all books, i seem to have given up on all writing. you may or may not have noticed that i stopped actually writing anything on this blog, & have pretty much been reduced to posting occasional lists, or quotes, or lyrics, or pictures. not that it matters, but it's not just the blog. my journal is stuck somewhere around august 29th. and apparantly at the moment i'm averaging about a week to return an email. so excuse me if this is a little rusty & a little random, but let me see if i have anything to say today...
studio 60
are any of you watching this show? if you have even a remote interest in dry wit & just... brilliance, then you'll like it.
as far as tv goes, yes heroes is addicting & the office is hilarious. also i seem to be letting grey's anatomy define my sense of self. and i still can't seem to stop watching all friends re-runs. (someone recently suggested that i would be good at the friends trivia game because i seemed to know so much about it. i probably should have been alarmed & offended. but it actually just made me really want to find & play the friends trivia game.) anyway, the point is that i've been watching a surprising amount of good shows lately, but nothing quite like studio 60. i love dry humor. i also love amanda peet, matthew perry, d. l. hughley, & that-guy-from-the-west-wing. and if anyone wants to sit down & talk about studio 60's portrayal of the 'religious & cultural divide,' please come find me.
spokompton
i might be moving again. maybe. if you know me, then you know that you can never be sure until i actually pack up & leave whether i'll be going somewhere or not. in the last few years i've almost moved to chile, bolivia, & africa. but i've also actually moved to seattle, spokane, & england. so we'll see.
world 66
speaking of traveling, check this out. you select the names of all the countries you've been to, & it generates a map. my europe looks good, but geez - apparantly there are whole vast continents i've never set foot on. south america, australia, all of freakin' asia. it makes me feel downright un-traveled.


product (red)


and speaking of africa... well, actually i wasn't speaking about africa but anyway, speaking of the world: my new favourite thing to be excited about is product (red). if you don't know about it, you can read about it (or go watch oprah, or go shop at gap, or go check out myspace.) anyway, i love africa - like really, crazy love africa. don't even mention africa around me unless you want to hear a whole speech about it. (just ask my poor friends & family who have watched 'the constant gardener' with me & had to sit through every single special feature and listen to my running commentary the whole time.) so i love world vision & the one campaign & bono & the invisible children movie & bill and melinda gates & all that.

but the thing about missions & charity & just the whole thing is that we always seem to have this all or nothing way of thinking. like -- if i want to be good & do something helpful, that means i have to quit my job & move across the world or stop buying c.d.'s & downloading music & give the money to mexico instead... or something like that. so we end up doing nothing, & maybe just feeling kind of guilty. anyway, that seems to be the general pattern in me. so i like this product (red) because it mixes an awareness of the messed up state of the world right in with everyday life.
i bought the inspired t-shirt which was made in lesotho, one of my favourite african countries. see? i could go on & on about this. i'll cut myself off right there & spare you the monologue.

my big, fat, greek...

my family is big & loud & funny & there is always something slightly bizarre going on & they are for sure some of my all-time favourite people in the whole world. we're crazy, & i love that. the last time i went to spokane it was for a concert for dax, which i told you about. this time it was for my grandpa's wedding.

my grandma hallie died last year. my grandpa had been married to her for 50 years. it's been a very long year. now he met a woman named dorothy who had also been married for 50 years & whose husband died one year before my grandma did. it's a long story! but they got married last week. these are the kind of beautiful & bizarre things that always seem to be happening in this family.

hornby, of course.

for those of you who have been anxiously searching for my end-of-the-month book report, which has been suspiciously absent for 2 months: never fear. this month, i read a book. it wasn't war & peace or anything, don't get too excited. but after 2 months of reading nothing more than september's issue of instyle, i was relieved to finish an actual novel. not to mention a book of essays i'm in the middle of... so you can look forward to some more raving about good ol' nick.