IP: I can’t believe you’re excited about dropping $500 on a dress.

Me: *still dancing* Honey, I’m not excited about dropping $500 on a dress.  I’m excited about dropping $1,000* on a dress.

IP: Oh.  Okay then.

When I told my mom this story, she laughed heartily, adoring her son-in-law-to-be even more.  She then relayed the story to my dad, who chuckled.  Dad gave me a $1,500 limit for my dress; IP is probably happy that my father’s more in tune with wedding dress prices than he is.

*Honestly, I would love to keep the dress in the mid-hundreds; I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to tease IP and then tell y’all about it.

Dramatic enough for you?  No!?  Read on!

IP has been sans TV for close to the length of our relationship; I have been without the television’s warm glowing warming glow going on three years.  If you’re completely honest with yourself, you have to admit that there’s not much going on there that’s absolutely vital and/or intellectually stimulating enough to keep any reasonable human anchored to a set for hours upon hours a day.  And yet it happens.  My family is rabid in their TV consumption, our friends are profoundly disappointed that we can’t share in their delight in bad VH1 dating shows.  You don’t know how many times I hear, “Hey, have you see that commer—” and then the person cuts themselves off, noting with extreme displeasure that I do not have a television set.  I just shrug and let the person continue with their description of said commercial since not much can stop a person from sharing something funny they saw on TV.

I’m not completely immune to television’s appeal, of course, and neither is IP; we both love The Simpsons, he’s into The Sopranos, I’m very much in love with Pushing Daisies — however, neither of us is motivated enough to actually buy a set.  I prefer to watch Pushing Daisies from the comfort of my computer screen, and that’s only if I remember that I need to watch the latest episode (I’m usually about two weeks behind at any given time).  IP is happy now that the entirety of The Sopranos is on DVD and he no longer has to worry about not getting spoiled when a season rolls around on HBO.  But the bulk of what’s on TV is definitely not appealing; during my six miler yesterday, I was subjected to the absurd and highly sexist Real Chance of Love, which apparently likes to dress women in tight clothes, have them throw themselves at two guys, and act like idiots in order to win the love of some stranger on TV.  I do realize that these people do it to themselves — they are the best kind of famewhores who love their 15 minutes and don’t mind a little humiliation for a bit of exposure — but I just don’t understand who would find this entertaining enough to actively watch (and schedule in their TiVo).  It’s not entertaining.  It’s embarrassing.  Thank the Jebuslug for CNN as an option to which to zone out to during my runs since my eyes need to go somewhere that’s not the treadmill display; not exactly my favorite source of news but at least it’s sometimes discussing relevant issues.

Hey.  I said sometimes.

My family in particular is threatening to gift us a TV for our wedding, saying that no house is complete without one.  Besides using it to hook up a Wii, I see no use for a television; there is very little that I want to watch and there is very little I can’t find online.  I have to fight for my time thanks to a long commute, time at the gym, and your typical weekly chores — I don’t want to let TV suck away any of the remaining time I have left over to read, relax, sometimes write and be outside.  I get enough TV at the gym; the 30 to 60 minutes I spend in front of the sets four times a week is quite enough.  And unfortunately, when I’m at the gym, all I get are bad TBS movies, dated sitcoms, Lou Dobbs (UGH) and bad dating shows; thank goodness for the iPod.  If TV were nothing but Pushing Daisies, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (which are all online, by the way)?  Heaven, I tell you!

So unfortunately, no matter how much disappointment and cajoling we may get, a TV is not in our future.  We do realize that if we have kids we might have to consider getting one; while we can handle not knowing what our office mates are talking about when they discuss the latest American Idol episode, it may be a bit unfair to subject our kids to the same until they make that choice themselves.  Of course, there is such a thing as moderation which we will practice.  The last thing I want is my kid to be a replica of me at 13: never active, always inside, glued to the TV once homework and my latest bad novel were done.  Our no-TV days will come to an end should we have kids, but I hope fervently that my kids will prefer play over TV.

So please, no TV, not as a wedding gift or any other kind of gift.  Sure, it may be a Stuff White People Like item, but in our case it’s a Stuff This Mexican and Italian Couple Like Because It Gives Us More Free Time thing.  Gratzi and gracias!

• A nice, long run in the morning.  Six miles or so of just spending time thinking about me, dammit.
• A trip to Dor-Ne Corset Shoppe in Silver Spring to get my boobs measured before I go dress shopping; while this isn’t necessary for the dress shopping itself, I’ve always wanted to skip a Victoria’s Secret measuring because, as all women know, they usually don’t do it correctly at VS.
• A trip to DSW to try to find some comfortable walking shoes that’ll get me to the Metro throughout the winter.  Nothing with mesh or suede, please.
• A trip to Greenan & Sons to see if they can tighten the prongs on my emerald; now that the engagement ring is insured, I want to make sure my poor emerald doesn’t go flying off one day (though IP graciously offered to have me pay for any replacement should that happen . . . hey, wait!).  I might want to have the ring cleaned, too, just so that it sparkles once I have to go back to work (assuming I get the ring back on Monday, which is probably doubtful).

Thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I made it to this point.  I honestly thought Friday, November 14, 6:30pm would never get here.  But now it is and I have a three-day weekend to enjoy.  Yay!

I’ll be honest: the past eight years have done much to add a nice, new layer of cynicism to my already countless coats, but this helps to sand that down a tad or two.  As a daughter of Mexican immigrants, discriminated against just because of my skin color, just because I could speak another language, just because my vacations consisted of visiting a “dirty” country and not Disney World, I’ve never felt completely comfortable here.  Or there (in Mexico).  Neither embraces me and both are quick to reject me.  Here, though, when I learned as a child, I learned that nearly no one in the history books looked like me.  And if they did, even just a bit, they were never as important as the white people who made history.  If it was a particularly bad piece of history (Mexican-American War, for example), those were the couple of weeks of school where people could get nastier than usual.  Those who looked like me?  Were bad.  And by extension, so was I.

Should I have kids, I can flip open their books to Obama’s picture and point out: look, hon.  Here’s a guy who’s as diverse as you are; you don’t share the same ethnicity, but you do share that wonderful mix of being from everywhere like he is.  To a child who inherits my skin color and not IP’s, I can point out that yes, yes, yes we can, honey.  And I can remind this child that while it’s nice to see someone who looks like you or shares your kaleidoscope of a background, it’s ultimately about people and that’s what Barack Obama’s campaign stressed most to me: it’s about unity, about people, about working together for something better.  It’s not an us versus them mentality in his mind; it’s soley an “us” that looks towards a healthier planet, healthier people, a strong economy, a peaceful nation, a society that respects different beliefs and lives.  These are the values that I want to instill in any children I may have and I am so happy that IP and I can point to Barack Obama and say, see.  See, honey.  Here’s a man who wants a United States.  Not just a “real” America that didn’t take into account all people.

Many will disagree with me.  There are plenty of people disappointed today.  I am not one of them.  I am delighted that Barack Obama is our next president and I am enthusiastic about the directions in which he can take us.  I am enthusiastic about contributing towards that change; I know that President-elect Obama cannot wave a magic wand and all the bad stuff from the past eight years will go far away.  It requires work.

I can work.  If it means telling any future children that this was a point in history in which the country began to reunite for them to enter a better world, I can work hard.

Congratulations to Barack Obama, Joe Biden and, above all, the U.S.

This morning, after a short weekend in which I had to work on Saturday, (and am feverishly anticipating a job search thanks to the shenanigans that went down at work this week), I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30am for a race.  I would’ve loved a few more hours in bed, but the fact that today was also the New York City marathon also got me out of bed — I need to turn my running around, and the only way to do that is to prove to myself that I can still race.  So up I was, IP accompanying me (isn’t he the sweetest?), heading to the Rockville 10K/5K at King Farm Village Center.  At 8:34am, I started the run and hoped for a good race.  I ended up with a great race instead.

My last race, the Race for the Cure, was pretty awful.  I didn’t think I did so well, the streets of DC aren’t really that fun to run on, and the late spring weather (nice ‘n warm) isn’t a favorite condition of mine.  I’ve always been partial to fall/winter runs, so when I decided that training for the marathon was going to be impossible for me since I didn’t really have a running base, I decided to start off smaller.  The 10K has never been a favorite race distance of mine — the 5K means less time invested and a 10K was my usual training distance, so it was snooze-worthy — but I decided I needed to get myself back to that distance in order to build up for a 10-miler and for a half-marathon next spring.  The 10K was a great starting point — above my current preferred distance (anywhere from three to 4.5 miles) and a distance I feel should become “easy” again.  So I trained for eight weeks, missing some days here and there, but rebuilding the semblance of a base.

Getting back to the 10K was a great move on my part.  I measured myself carefully, starting out slowly and deliberately, intentionally focusing not on the people around me (it’s easy to get sucked into the idea of passing, passing, passing peope!) but on my pace and my breathing (I love you, Forerunner!).  It seemed as if I reached the halfway point quickly; the race as a whole was a joy.  What hills there were I took in easy stride, finding myself passing plenty of people here (which was surprising; hills are my downfall, but I’ve made it a point to tackle two hills that give me trouble while in training).  When I finished, I felt like I could’ve gone further (which is great since I definitely want to go further!).  So it was disappointing to discover that the tag I wore didn’t register at all. 

(Though I’m still wearing my rightfully earned race t-shirt, dammit!)

However, as I said, the Forerunner came to the rescue.  It said I ran 6.29 miles in 59:22; not spectacular, obvs, but pretty damn good for someone who thought she would not come in at under an hour.  And the fact that the Forerunner registered a slightly longer distance means that I was a tiny bit faster than I anticipated.  I am extremely happy about that.

I’m looking forward to my next race (which I think will be the Candy Cane City 5K — let’s just say that I’m not too far from it) and I’m looking forward to having the Forerunner by my side from 5K to marathon, charting my runs even if those new-fangled tags (not chips, alas, which have never failed me) decide that I actually didn’t run the race.

Yesterday was, simply put, a clusterfuck of a day in which I learned that the word “team” means just “me” (i.e., WordNerd will do all the work!).  I am highly disappointed in a person who I thought was on my side.  Our amiable work relationship will never be the same (he cannot buy me off with game tickets, contrite gestures, or anything of the sort), and I hope to be out of here well in advance of July, a month in which I’d have to travel extensively with him.  I would love to rescind the invitation I extended to the wedding — if he can’t support me at work on a critical day, I don’t want him anywhere near a personal event.

I am handling the work just fine, but I will be taking several days off soon for several reasons:

• A day in mid-November in order to recover from these projects
• A week off the week of Thanksgiving in order to de-stress from work in general and to start my job search
• A couple of days of in December in which to dress shop with my mom and sister
• A few days around Christmas and New Years in order to ring in what will be the year in which a) I marry the most wonderful man in the world and 2) hopefully get a new job

I can’t wait to be away from here.  I’ve reached the point of no return and the job, it has jumped the shark, it has!

*”Stop”, matchbox twenty

When I noticed that a former stalker of IP’s (seriously; I should have IP do a guest post on this subject) might have hit our wedding website, I communicated to him that, perhaps, “IP’s stalker be crazy! IP’s stalker be craaaaaazaaaay!!!!!” IP answered:

“Groove is in the hea-arrrt! Groove is in the heeeee-aaaaa-aaart!! [just trying to finally get the be crazy song out of your head....]”

To which I responded:

“I *like* the white devils song, thankyouverymuch! In my head it stays!”

Sorry, it’s just funny, especially the way that the comedian playing Ayers looks at the camera at the end of the segment.

In all seriousness, I’ll be relieved when Tuesday gets here; even if I’m in line for hours I’ll be happy that the election is nearing its end. Not only will one of my events be over, but what seems like the longest campaign season during my lifetime will finally check out (unless the results are contested and are in legal limbo for a while — please Sweet Zombie Jesus, no!). I truly hope I’m heading downtown for the inauguration next January; if not, you’ll find me “working” from home that day (translation: drinking heavily, sobbing and persuading IP that moving to Mexico might not be so craaaaaazaaaay).

In the meantime, I’m going to figure out a way to work “Wedding vows be crazy! Wedding vows be craaaaaazaaaay!” into our wedding ceremony.

First thing’s first: I’ve gone through the entirety of the Jasper Fforde canon since the last book list. After The Eyre Affair, I was unable to resist buying first the rest of his Thursday Next novels, and subsequently failed to resist the call to his Nursery Crime series. I am extremely disappointed that Shades of Grey, advertised as coming in July 2008, is now slated to appear in summer 2009. Throughout my reading of the Thursday Next novels, I was absolutely delighted — it’s so much fun to read a writer who appreciates, admires and, well, loves the written word so much (because it’s not so obvious in some of the other things I’ve read in the recent past). From integrating footnotes into a vital part of the novels to making the clichéd exhortation of falling into a book possible, the Thursday Next novels were absolutely golden to me. Imagine my delight in realizing that there are three more on their way!

The Nursery Crime series, a spin-off from the Nextian novel The Well of Lost Plots (but not acknowledged as such in the Nursery Crime series since the Nursery Crime series is supposed to be a world unto its own), is also charming, but on a different level than the Thursday Next novels. If you think the Thursday Next novels require a huge suspension of disbelief, you’ve seen nothing until you tackle the Nursery Crime series. The detective series, headlined by Jack Spratt and Mary Mary, deals with crime within the nursery rhyme world — nursery rhyme characters live in the Reading, Berkshire area and Jack Spratt is in charge of the so-called Nursery Crimes Division. The books have dealt with the untimely and suspicious death of Humpty Dumpty and the disappearance of Goldilocks (with an insane Gingerbreadman thrown in for good measure). Like the Nextian series, the Nursery Crime series is snarky, self-deprecating and witty — you do you have to be on your toes, and the more you know about nursery rhymes, the better. Watch out for a public fascination with crime stories (more so than in real life; imagine a press conference everyday with a show-off detective outlining how he pieced together a crime), thermonuclear cucumbers, and aliens who speak in binary. I won’t say that it’s as engaging as the Thursday Next novels, but it holds its own. It’s best to let them stand on their own merits, anyway. However, don’t read the Nursery Crime novels until you’ve read the aforementioned Well of Lost Plots.

In between the readings of the two Fforde series, I also had the misfortune of picking up Sloane Crosley’s self-indulgent tripe, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (seriously, lady, just stick to blogs like I’m doing; I’d never inflict my vain, self-centered writing on the publishing world!). I picked up Crosley’s essays because it was noted that she had a similar tone to Sarah Vowell — whose new book, The Wordy Shipmates, I’m currently reading — and Sarah Vowell should be insulted. The driving idea behind Crosley’s essays is that no matter what she does, she doesn’t come out ahead and is prone to massive fuck-ups that she can only attribute to being a strange, strange person. It’s one big love and/or hatefest with herself, like every other person in the world has with themselves. Except that Sloane Crosely got to publish and make money off of her stories, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why.

There are no great insights that Crosley experiences and reveals to the reader; no careful examination, no witty observations, no everyday occurrences that take on another layer of meaning thanks to her writing. As far as I can tell, she just tell stories that she thinks may be funny, that she thinks may have imparted a lesson on her (but not on the reader), thinks have some kind of introspective or at least quirky bent to them. The only time I identified with her was when she was discussing her name — in the chapter “Bastard out of Westchester”— but even then she cites her name as “a placeholder for the heritage and cultural grounding [she] never had.” And that’s where Crosley’s writing ultimately fails — whatever it is she’s trying to bring to the table, she does it seemingly without context, and consequently she flounders. Everyone has heritage and cultural grounding — it may not be what Crosley considers unique or exotic, but we all come with some cultural context. Just because American culture is a bit of a salad doesn’t make it bland.

I use my name as a placeholder as a reminder of the cultural heritage and grounding that I know I possess and want to honor. Here I am, the daughter of Mexican Catholic immigrants who made good, sent three of their kids of Michigan and one to MIT, grew up in a vanilla-white town, fell in love with medieval/Renaissance/Early Modern literature, is marrying a Ph.D. scientist raised Jewish from New York, is somehow an event planner even though it’s writing and research that really rocks, has lived in Mexico and Canada and Michigan and now DC . . . I’m always disappointed in people who say they have no culture. Yes, you do. It doesn’t have a simple narrative structure, but it’s there. And to tell bland stories to get around thinking about who you are? Way to undermine yourself. It’s not charming. It’s just sad. I’m still trying to find a way to write about myself intelligently — Crosley still hasn’t achieved this, but she managed to get published.

One weekend later . . .

Speaking of the comparison that brought me to Crosley, I’ve now finished the newest Sarah Vowell book since I began writing this book list. What can I say? Only Sarah Vowell can persuade me to read about pilgrims. A focus on the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Vowell hones in on the persons who begin to create a rich history for the United States, and contrasts them with the ideas of Puritanism and pilgrims that we have today. Say evangelical and you automatically think of pilgrims, but this is not so. The Massachusetts Bay Colony pilgrims were far from the God-within, book-larnin’s’ for pansies, give-me-my-gun evangelicals that the word “pilgrim” may bring to mind. These people established Harvard, after all. Go to Harvard today and you’re an elite bastard (what if you go to school across the river? Are you then an elite nerd? Mathgeek?).

As I’ve said before, United States history as it’s taught in schools is terrible; Mexican history teachers are much more willing to get into the conflicts that arose between various factions, will gleefully recount bloody details and obscure events, are happy to slander any particular president if the historical facts call for it. Not so in the States — history is so damn sanitized that even Andrew Jackson comes off as looking good after he force-marches the Cherokee down the Trail of Tears. What I enjoyed about 1776 and now The Wordy Shipmates is that the personages that Vowell presents are much more than people leaving England for an uncertain fate, but bravely facing what may come in the name of liberty; once there she goes into depth of how they actually conducted themselves, from regularly banishing people who questioned the church fathers and magistrates to establishing new colonies that demanded the right to religious freedom to engineering one of the worst slaughters of American Indians. Here’s John Winthrop, a pious bastard who is sometimes likeable and sometimes downright despicable; Roger Williams, who founds Rhode Island and presents himself to a loudmouth who believes in equality and the right to practice one’s own religion; here’s Anne Hutchinson, who was always a martyr according to our history books, but who damned herself during her trial and was a precursor to the proudly uneducated evangelical that terrorizes our country today (yes, I used that word on purpose, dearies). And here are the sachems of the local American Indian tribes, first betraying one another in order to survive alongside the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and then attempting (futilely) to band together in order to push back against the colony as its dominance rose. As with 1776, you learn that it wasn’t just Plymouth Rock-First Thanksgiving-1776! The intricacies in between are what shaped the nation for better or for worse, and of course Vowell adds her own patented dry-wit observations that make you laugh out loud until you realize with horror that, funny as the observation may be, it’s still acurrate and demonstrates how a) smart or 2) cruel those wordy shipmates actually were.

Onto the book list:

Finished:

1) Flesh and Spirit: Private Life in Early Modern Germany by Steven E. Ozment
2) Women at the Beginning - Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary by Patrick J. Geary
3) Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris
4) A Man for All Seasons: A Play in Two Acts by Robert Bolt
5) Lisey’s Story by Stephen King
6) 1776 by David McCullough
7) The Savage Detectives: A Novel by Roberto Bolaño (Translation by Natasha Wimmer)
8) The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell
9) Duma Key by Stephen King
10) The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
11) Me by Katharine Hepburn
12) The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A. J. Jacobs
13) The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
14) Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert
15) Twilight by Stephenie Meyer
16) The Eyre Affair: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde
17) The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
18) I Was Told There’d Be Cake by Sloane Crosley
19) Lost in a Good Book: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde
20) The Well of Lost Plots: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde
21) Something Rotten by Jasper Fforde
22) Thursday Next: First Among Sequels by Jasper Fforde
23) The Big Over Easy: A Nursery Crime by Jasper Fforde
24) The Fourth Bear: A Nursery Crime by Jasper Fforde
25) Blaze: A Posthumous Novel by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
26) The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell

Re-read:

Empty

Currently Reading:

1) Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes by Eamon Duffy
2) The Aeneid by Virgil (Translation by Robert Fagles)

Waiting To Be Read (Already Purchased, Got as Gifts, Borrowed from My Boyfriend, or Otherwise Accessible without the Use of Funds, But Not an Assurance That I Will Read These Before I Buy More Books):

1) People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
2) Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn by William J. Mann