The dangers of literacy

I just read a short essay, "You Should Date An Illiterate Girl" by Charles Warnke. The whole thing is an explanation of why guys should avoid dating a girl who reads. (Bottom line? They're too smart for their own good. Or the good of the guy dating them. But now that I've ruined it for you, it's worth reading the essay to get to that destination anyway.)

The actual point of the article aside, oh, how spoke to me. Because, apparently, I am a girl who reads.

I know, you're shocked right? Stop the presses! Hell must be freezing over!

Oh, wait, I'm the girl who read over 130 books in 2010. I'm pretty sure I have ink in my veins in lieu of blood.

Evaporation

There's an Angel's Share that mysteriously disappears from the mixing bowl of every baked good produced in my kitchen.



Sneaky angels.

(That's salted-butter caramel. The angels seemed to be particularly fond of it.)

Apocalypse

If the apocalypse actually happens tomorrow, you're all welcome to come over to my house for a post-apocalyptic brunch, say around 11 AM. (Assuming you can navigate the zombie hordes that I assume will be running rampant. My french toast is good, but you won't be able to fully appreciate it if you're suffering from a zombie bite, so please take appropriate precautions.)

We should establish a password though, so my boyfriend knows to not bash you in the head with his home-defense weapon of choice (a baseball bat) when you try to enter the premises. Preferably something that strikes fear into the hearts of our enemies at the same time. You know, something like, "SPOON!!" Yeah, let's go with that.

Disparities

I think I'm having a mid-life crisis entirely conducted in my own head.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the differences between who we actually are, who we think we are, who other people think we are, and who we aspire to be. It's funny how wide the differences between those versions of self can be.

Estival

The past year has been unseasonably and, dare I say, unreasonably cold in Southern California. We basically never had a summer - it was the coldest ever recorded - and there's been an unheard of amount of gloom and rain.

After this weekend, I think we're finally past that.

Aural

I'm learning to play the guitar. For Christmas, my brother found me a twin of the guitar that he inherited from our parents. And over the past few months he's been teaching me to play it. (I've mentioned that he's awesome before, right?)

It's probably not the way one should learn an instrument (it's certainly not the way I learned the piano or violin), but we've kind of skipped the normal "learn technique and all the chords first" and gone straight to "learn these five chords or this strumming technique in order to immediately apply them to this one song." It's a little convoluted, but much more rewarding, because then I can actually play something immediately. (Of course, there are lots of songs I can't play yet because I haven't learned all of the chords and such. You win some, you lose some.)

So far I've learned a rousing 4 songs. I need to up my practice time and learn more songs soon, becasue whatever songs I'm currently studying are stuck in my head on repeat even when I'm not playing, and a 4-song playlist gets old quickly.

At least I like the songs I've learned so far. A lot. :o)

"Well it goes like this the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall and the major lift..."

Recuperation

I just got back from a long vacation with my boyfriend.