Bread and Bread

The nice thing about top-ten/-five lists is that they give you a chance to reassess your initial raves and pans. Sometimes what dazzles is not what sticks. There are still a lot of said-to-be-good 2010 movies I haven’t seen yet, which may be why my movie list is low on Oscar-bait releases. But I like to think I just have original tastes. Shutter Island was awesome, okay? Also, I may be avoiding Black Swan because, even though it was crazy in just the right way and expertly, physically depicted the implosive nature of perfectionism, I’m kind of pissed at Natalie Portman for getting pregnant despite having zero body fat and a fly-by-night boyfriend.* The first seven books on my book list are ones I indisputably loved—they said something big about the world, or they struck a nerve personally, or they were lushly textured, or they were more clever than I realized until the very end. The last three and my two honorable mentions are more or less interchangeable in terms of rank—all reall

It’s 1 a.m. and I’m awake right now, jacked up on adrenaline, because nine fire fighters just left our building. A fire started upstairs (note to all: candles and heaters shouldn’t mix), and I don’t want to think what would have happened if Alyssa and her friend hadn’t acted fast, if we hadn’t been home to lend our fire extinguisher and/or if there hadn’t been a fire station two minutes away. Thank you, tax dollars. All human and feline residents involved are safe, and there wasn’t much damage to the building. Ferdinand , who believes even the siren-free garbage truck is a dinosaur, hasn’t come out from under the bed. Our improvised evacuation plan was to shoo all the cats outside and let them take shelter where they could find it. It turns out that, when someone pounds on the front door after midnight, their instincts don’t tell them to head for the hills but instead for the least reachable place in the house. When the fire trucks arrived, I was unsuccessfully prodding an embedde

Sometimes the metaphorical becomes literal: It rained for days. Then there was a ray of sun. Then it rained harder than ever, but everyone agreed it would stop again soon. A lot of nice people lent their umbrellas. Okay, that last part is still just metaphorical. I don’t need to borrow an umbrella because I have a couple I probably stole. I don’t want to know what the metaphorical implications of umbrella theft are. I like that Jesus was born in the dead of winter, and if it’s a story that evolved from pagan solstice traditions, that makes me like it even more. Every culture needs a birth-as-rebirth story. We got a card from our friends Una and Henry that said, “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” I tend to be a little wary of religious cards—as I mentioned, I find even Santa slightly suspicious —but it hit me what a lovely sentence that is. The “lived among us” part is my favorite. I like the idea that an idea could be so powerful it could come hang out with us. It seems very

“As Christmas icons go, I was never into Santa,” I told Work Cathy, explaining why I never bought Santa cards. “I’ll take a nice reindeer or snowman any day. But maybe that’s because my parents never told me that Santa was real, so I never had those magical associations with him. He was just some old fat man.” My parents’ rationale was that 1) they didn’t want to lie; they always expected honesty from me, so it was only fair, and 2) if there was a present they couldn’t afford to buy, they didn’t want me to think Santa had put me on his naughty list. My parents were/are very sincere people. When I was a teenager and wanted to be like my friends in every way, I resented them for depriving me of glowy childhood memories. Later I thought they made kind of a cool, nonconformist choice. But today I realized that I move through my adult life exactly as if not getting something I want means I’ve been bad. My parents never told me Santa was real because they wanted to create a fair world, one i

I subscribe to the school of thought that says dream sequences can and should almost always be cut from novels and movies. Save that shit for your therapist, you know? Dreams work a little better in sitcoms, usually because they’re an excuse to act out a New Gidget version of A Christmas Carol or some such wackiness. I’m pretty sure dreams are not meant to be recounted in blogs either, but man, I’ve had some weird ones lately, so here’s a quick executive summary: 1. I was attacked by a puppy that looked like a cartoon sheep. Its mother was waiting in the wings, ready to get all mama-bear on me. AK rescued me from its scary-looking puppy talons. 2. I was babysitting Jamie and Lee-Roy’s baby , Kohana. We had a great day on the town; she laughed at all my jokes. But on the drive home I realized we had no car seat—Kohana was just sitting in my lap—and I was like, “Aaah! I’m Britney Spears!” 3. I was ordering some potato skins at some sort of food court and the checker suspected me of cr

When Work Cathy walked into a meeting yesterday, a guy she didn’t know said, “Smile! Let’s see your dimples.” “I don’t have dimples,” she said. “Sure you do—right here.” He screwed his fingers into the corners of his mouth. Later, when a plate of cookies was making its way around the room, he passed it to her and said, “Here ya go, Dimples.” Today at lunch I was walking back from Hallmark, where I’d found myself looking at a card featuring a nativity scene and thinking, God, there’s another person who got pregnant without even trying. On the sidewalk, a greasy-looking guy in his thirties called out, “Smile! It’s a sunny day!” “Fuck you,” I said. Translation: 1) No one would ever tell a guy to smile. When guys brood, it’s considered sexy. 2) You don’t know me, asshole. Maybe my grandmother just died. Or maybe I was bummed that the bread in my sandwich was a little dried out. Either way, not your business. I feel sorry that I can’t deliver Cheery Holiday Greetings Cheryl to AK on a reg

AK and I were on the walking part of a run when she said she would love for our book club to read a Jennifer Egan book. “Nominate it!” I said. “But her writing is so odd,” AK said. “I think she’s great, but I don’t know if other people would like her.” The first book I forced on our group was The Last of Her Kind , which I thought was beautiful: sprawling and social but also deep and personal. But I think at least half the book club saw it as a bunch of girly hand-wringing. I didn’t really care. Book club is one of my favorite activities, comprised of some of my favorite people, so you’d think I would want them to be happy. But sometimes I forget that most people don’t have the same philosophy about reading as I do, which is that the goodness of a book is just one of many possible benefits of reading it. Every book has the potential to tell me something I don’t know about language and the world, even if only by negative example. Same goes for plays and movies. A long time ago I saw th

I really put the “no” in November this year—in many ways, but particularly because I read no actual, physical books. Call it the wave of the future. I call it “I have to read student work whenever I’m not driving, eating, sleeping or doing my regular job.” Here’s what I listened to: Mr. Paradise by Elmore Leonard: Probably not the best book to listen to on CD—I'm pretty sure I missed some major plot points, although I did love Robert Forster's narration (finally, an actor who can capture the mood of Leonard's neo-noir prose but doesn't go overboard trying to "do" the voice of each character). This is the first Elmore Leonard book I've read. I would point any freshman writer to his exemplary use of detail, even if the story itself—one of call girls and hit men and mistaken identities—isn't hugely riveting or thought-provoking. Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck: The main character in this book—John Steinbeck—is a successful author in his late 50s.

I recently discovered that Etsy has “ member-curated galleries ” of nifty crafty goods. Ordinarily this would strike me as a suspicious marketing gimmick—I mean, do we know for sure that these “members” aren’t Etsy employees or at least Etsy vendors?—but for some reason I’m into it. Maybe because if you do a search for “wallet,” you get 43,671 results, and it’s hard to sift through wallets made out of duct tape and wallets that are actually clutch purses (not the same!) to find one you like. I’ll probably do a little holiday shopping on Etsy this year, and also at All Saints’ annual Alternative Christmas Market , though sometimes I wonder if the people on my list get genuinely excited when someone in Ethiopia gets a chicken in their name. I mean, I would. So if you’re shopping for me, take note. I haven’t forgotten about my old friends, books, either. Bronwyn over at GuerrillaReads has some suggestions for where/how to buy sustainable, recyclable, indie-made reading material. I pout