The local grocery store has an extensive variety of beer. Well’s Banana Bread Beer is worth trying and is a sweet departure from the oatmeal stouts I’ve been known to reach for.
Starbucks has a line of “Signature Hot Chocolates” now. The Caramel Salted Hot Chocolate, which is actually toffee flavored and topped with whipped cream, caramel sauce and sprinkled with sea salt, is sweet and salty albeit deiciously overpriced. Besides open wounds, salt seems to make everything better.
Why haven’t I discovered the song “Grace Kelly” by Mika sooner? I’d never even heard of the artist until a drag queen performance last week. I don’t know what to be bothered by more: the fact that there is so much great music out there that I’m missing out on or that my study schedule has forced me so far out of the main stream that I treat the playlists of drag queens as a form of melodious gospel.
My camera phone takes decent quality pictures of everything except food. For general picture messaging its great. In the kicthen however, even a beef wellington through the lens of my phone’s camera will look less appetizing than a “Tour of Italy” from that popular, local cucina italiana. I have decent quality pictures of the food I’ve been cooking and eating lately on my digital camera, though its all moot until I figure out how to transfer them from my digital camera to my laptop and then post them on here.
Its cheaper to fill our gas tanks with bald eagle heads than gasoline, lots of retailers are having huge markdowns and, perhaps most importantly, Linens & Things is going out of business. These can only mean two things: the apocalypse is near and the has gone to shit (that may be redundant.) Election day is soon-ish. I hope the President-elect shows up with a huge grinder of seal salt to sprinkle generously down on our economy.
One of our professors managed to work the phrase “enter into sexual congress” into his lecture last week. Sometimes I can’t tell if he’s genuinely of a mindset as antiquated as his verbiage or if he is fully aware and revels in the class’ befuddlement.
My wardrobe could use a mild pre-winter revamping. I’m on a budget, though, and should start actually acting like it instead of just writing about it. In conclusion, I’ll probably blow some money on new threads this weekend and lament about my lack of money in a few weeks.
Jean Peal Gaultier Fall 2008 Menswear
There is something very Oliver Twist/A Clockwork Orange about the story that Jean Paul Gaultier’s Fall 2008 Men’s collection is trying to tell. Derby hats, umbrellas, sepia-tones, vests that don’t scream “caterer.” Did I mention derbies? I appreciate this kind of aesthetic so much.
Anyone want to travel to Europe for a month next summer? Should first-year law students spend the summer before second year in an internship? What happens if they don’t?
Fall Break is next week. I’m planning on heading home Wednesday, right after class, and getting back to Buffalo Sunday evening. There are so many people I can’t wait to see at home — even more exciting since I’m not planning a visit home for Thanksgiving. My niece turns one year old next month and is more adorable every time I see her.
Filed under: Ramblings & Observations
There a number of things I don’t understand about (most) organized sports. Not the sports themselves, but moreso the mob-like mentality of sports fans and all of the curiosities that go along with fandom. What perplexes me, mainly, is how people get so so riled up about their “home team,” as if that word encompasses even the tiniest shred of home pride in the traditional sense of the word (according to my traditions, of course, with which I will assume everyone is well-versed and commonly subscribes to.)
Sexy Plumber / Sexy Yankee?
But seriously, most players on the teams aren’t from the city that they play for (rather, get paid to play for.) How does that make any sense? I would rather see actual, fat plumbers from the Bronx on the Yankees go against a Boston-based team of questionably-sober, incomprehensible Red Sox. Just me?
Left to right: Obama & Ludacris (singer/songwriter)
In fact, even more ludicrous is how season to season the decks are reshuffled. And by decks I mean rosters. Switcharoo’s and the like, therein looming a large chance that the favorites from one season could potentially go to a different, or even rival team.
Also, athletes by and large are not playing for the hometown fans (this is unsubstantiated but just go with it.) They are playing for the paychecks signed by rich, old men who own the “teams.” They own the teams but refer to them as “franchises,” which boils my blood for a whole different set of reasons. Its mostly a verbiage thing. When I hear about sport franchises I cant help but immediately think of sports teams as some abstraction of a fast food restaurant. Franchise, when you hear the word, evokes thoughts of things like business models, profitability, Big Macs and other (less delicious) business-y type concepts proposed by mustachioed corporate big-wigs and fat-cats.
I’m just sayin’, white folks is crazy. And, so is my perspective on sports fandom.
Filed under: Ramblings & Observations
One thing that can certainly test our limits on when to behave tactfully is, kind of obviously, necessity. More specifically, our need to eat dictates how we feel and how we act accordingly. When we’re hungry, we’re cranky. When we’re full, we’re at least not hungry and usually not cranky. When I’m hungry most rules of social grace go directly out of the window (and then somehow come back inside once I’m fed, I suppose?)
This morning I had the pleasure of driving and accompanying my roommate to a doctor’s appointment/procedure. The policy of the office is to have the driver stay for the length of the visit, which not unlike some kind of bizarre house arrest. The require a driver because patients are way too doped up afterwards to drive themselves home (and this is an understatement for how out of it my roommate really was – the wonders/my envy of those on painkillers are fascinating enough for a post of it’s own – but I digress.)
Enter utter disregard: It was my intention the night before to go to sleep a little earlier, and naturally, I opted for a night of hard drinking instead. I woke up, and like most mornings, found myself at the mercy of a hangover and hunger pains bordering on starvation (best described as an emptiness in the bottom of my stomach which could just have easily been confused for feelings of general disenfranchisement on behalf of Sarah Palin, or what one might imagine that would feel like.) I dropped my roommate off, asked for permission from the receptionist to step out and grab a bite to eat and returned moments later with a small picnic. My roommate made quick work of reminding me that I was eating breakfast in a room full of people whom at least 50% of hadn’t tasted solid food in over 24 hours, and 100% of whom were eyeing me down as if I had started cooking a spoonful of crack atop a burning bible (ridiculous to imagine, I know, since it wasn’t even noon yet.) Fuck it – for all of the reasons they may have felt miserable for not eating, and even worse for watching me stuff my face with a bagel, the bottom line is that I was hungry and come hell or high water nothing would stand in my way of eating.
Initially, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was doing anything unacceptable, but I took my cue when I felt welcomed as warmly as if I’d stumbled into a Weight Watchers meeting with a birthday cake in tow. On my way home I considered stumbling into a Weight Watchers meeting with a birthday cake, but then I realized that (a) it wasn’t my birthday and (b) fat people love cake, and the irony might be lost (and, as one might infer, one thing I will not risk is gambling with the integrity of an ironic and potentially delicious situation.)
Filed under: Ramblings & Observations
One thing I have never been good at is getting mail-in rebates in on time. I like to think that most people are just as terrible about keeping up with these kinds of things as I am. I say “these kinds of things,” as if by generalizing something so specific (and utterly ungeneralizable, might I add) as mailing in a rebate will somehow make me feel better about myself. The logic behind this is that it’s not as bad if I can convince myself that I’m not alone in being forgetful, and that a legitimate, marginalized collective of lazy assholes like myself exists.
Enter dissonance: When you have headphones on, and you’re listening to a great song, it’s so easy to convince yourself that the entire world is also hearing the same music you are. Well, no… I take that back. But it *is* easy to convince yourself that the entire world *should* be listening to the same music you are. The world at large would be better off, at least auditorally, at the melodiously, tyrannical mercy of a jukebox on your terms.
