Monthly Archives: March 2012

Mar 23 2012
38 Comments
Three minute read

Five Blogs and One Website You Must Read

VERY EXCITED!

Not too long ago a certain lady at Life in the Boomer Lane was featured on Freshly Pressed for her piping hot word cakes that flew off the griddle and were gobbled up by hungry bloggers. I, a mere blog-troller, came along and posted a comment that was just bizarre enough to lure her to my blogging den, where—wonder of wonders—she liked what she saw and said this to me (paraphrased): “By golly kid, you got some kinda spark and I’m a gonna feature you in my neck o’ the woods sometime pretty soon now.”

And I thought that was just swell. Feature me (and others) she did, and my smile beamed a little brighter that day.

Fast forward some amount of time. The trees are slightly leafier. Children have eaten after school snacks and burned holes in their clothes while playing with matches. Gas tanks have been refilled, credit cards maxed out, light bulbs replaced, and Snotting Black was—wonders of wonders—freshly pressed, my hungover mug gracing the cover of wordpress.com for the longest 3 days of my life (they keep the Friday ones up until Monday.)

Apparently people liked the tasty blog pudding I mixed up that day and customers came in by the dozen and left lots of nice comments and some lies like “Your hangover picture isn’t that bad” and “You  shouldn’t drink.”

Then I remembered the day not too long ago when a certain blogger  burned her spotlight on the rest of us. Now it’s my turn. Check out these blogs I’ve found and one website that I have to promote because I love it.

The Rumpus: If you like to read or write, you need to be exploring The Rumpus like you don’t have a day job. This website is one of the best things I have found on the internet. If you want to cry, go here. If you want to laugh, go here. If you want to listen to good music, go here. If you want good advice, go here. It’s all on The Rumpus. And sign up for emails from Stephen Elliott because they will touch your heart.

Cosmic Revolutions: A blog dedicated to exploring the fascinating world of the future. Beware. You might learn something while reading here.

A Rebel with a Cause: Come for the beautiful photography, stay for the interesting prose and the worthy cause of SAVING THE ENTIRE EARTH.

Red Herring Online: Read his essay on how the English language is a sandwich. I was impressed and you will be too. A friendly and well spoken socialist, because we’re all comrades.

Dashtodine: Finally, a unique food blog concept with great writing to boot. This dude likes to dine, and makes time to appreciate food. I’m tearing out a page of his book and using it to wipe hot dog grease off my hands after I read it. Implementation of the philosophy comes later.

Girl in the Hat: It starts out as an attractive blog layout and gravatar image, but it doesn’t stop there. Read something! You’ll like it! You don’t even have to read all of a post—just the beginning is enough to enrich your day.

And thanks to all of you who read my blog, even just once. That’s time you’ll never get back and you gave it to reading, skimming, and/or commenting on my blog. For that I am grateful.

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Mar 22 2012
27 Comments
Humorous, One minute read

How to Be Funny With Words

I have a friend. He is real and his name is Joe. He is a novelist who co-runs a website called The Write Practice. One day I was in the bathtub playing with rubber ducky and suddenly I was like “DAMN! I need to write a guest post for this blog and tell everyone how to be funny with their words.”

I put on a towel and was teleported at that instant into his living room, scaring him, his wife, and his dog as I demanded he let me guest post on his blog. There was no knife in my hands. He acquiesced.

Later that night, I, the humorist, drank alone and wrote a post with my own blood mingled with the four humors of three cats. It was a Friday.

Weeks pass, and we arrive at today. While millions of showers are being taken, my guest post “How to be Funny with Words” will bloop onto the screen of The Write Practice, startling thousands and making hundreds more cringe as they pick their noses.

Please go to The Write Practice, and for God’s sakes, write something funny for once in your life. Do it! WRITE ABOUT THE SPOOOOOOOOOONS!

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Mar 21 2012
30 Comments
Anecdotes, Egypt, Three minute read

Jam Quest

All the sweetness of sugar, with a hint of fruit

What started as a quest for 70% fruit jam ended with me hopelessly lost and asking a gas station attendant for directions to the Nile.

When I first came to Egypt, I had a peasant’s understanding of the world and was content eating jam that was merely tasty and cheap. To me, jam was just a colder and more gelatinous form of candy that happened to contain the occasional hunk of fruit. However, here in Cairo I encountered people who subscribed to a different jam-philosophy. Oddly, they believed that jam should taste like fruit, not sugar. I heard the term “fruit percentage” for the first time as they sneered at jams that consisted mostly of artificial coloring and sugar.

Because of them, I was forced to try a jam that contained 60% fruit. It was a strange experience. My taste buds, accustomed to being blasted and then numbed by the sweetness, instead found themselves underwhelmed.

I enjoyed it on an intellectual level, but my ignorance had not yet been beaten out of me and I  wanted my sugar jelly back. However, something strange had happened to me. I had been afflicted with the sugar-guilt. Now when I went to the supermarket, I secretly craved the cheap, facemeltingly sweet jams, but the sugar guilt haunted me and I purchased the sixty percent instead. I thought maybe the reason I didn’t love it as much as my friends was that there wasn’t enough fruit. Perhaps if I tried a jam with more fruit, I would see the wisdom of jam snobbery.

I had heard rumors of Mom’s jam: a 70% wonder found only at a place called Dina Farms. Months ago I had seen this store, and after spending too much time inside one day I decided to go on a jam hunt, relying only on my memory and my innate directional instinct. I set out confidently and within ten minutes found myself completely lost on the edge of what seemed to be a forest in the middle of Cairo. “Where did this come from?” I wondered.

Then I thought to myself, “The Nile. I must make towards the Nile. I will use its mother banks to as a great trail of breadcrumbs.”  I happened upon a gas station attendant and asked him where the Nile was. Confused at my apparent confusion, he asked me where I was trying to go and I said resolutely:  “I want to go towards the Nile” He pointed me in the right direction and soon I saw the glimmering waters in front of me. I was happy to be on my way home, albeit jamless.

Later on, I considered how ridiculous it was that I had just used a 4130 mile long river as a landmark to find my 2 person apartment. I imagined my reaction if a bedraggled tourist in downtown Oklahoma City asked me where the Rocky Mountains are and decided sometime’s it’s better just to leave such matters be.

P.S. Vote for Belle at Educlaytion’s March Movie Madness. She’s up against Atticus Finch, and let’s be honest here…she deserves to beat that sucker.

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Mar 20 2012
53 Comments
Fiction, Humorous, Stories

Prophecies in the Bathroom

Speak and we listen, oh wise oracle

My roommate’s loofah is an oracle.

As it sits unassumingly on the bathtub’s rim in all its rough, spongy banality, it communicates with the gods and is our mediator, though I do not presume to call it our friend.

Its strange shape– the mysterious internal chambers, the bizarre woven texture, the evenly regulated rippling of its exterior—is designed to absorb the gods’ will and disperse it throughout the bathroom as if in a fine prophetical mist. How many times have I been in the bathroom when I am visited by intense revelations: insights into my future after I return from Egypt, novel birthday gift ideas, meals I should eat later on in the day, the appropriate length to which I should cut my bangs?

Before I knew the truth, I thought these moments of brilliance were the result of my own cognitions. Now I know they came from the sponge.

The oracle is ancient. Before this apartment building, before the city of Cairo had even been conceived of in thought or deed, the oracle quietly existed. In the time of the ancient Greeks, sandaled men and women would journey on foot for days with baskets and pots on their heads just to seek the oracle’s presence, and if they were lucky, its prophecies. It was revered by all, though they feared to worship it because of the gods’ anger.

The oracle itself did not want their worship; it wanted quiet. It longed to cease answering the absurd petitions of man and meld its consciousness completely with that of the gods. Daily and nightly it was pulled out of its reverie to a brash existence, greedy humans grubbing after what was not theirs to know. Who could ever truly understand the will of the gods?

The Greeks came and went, as did countless other civilizations, the piles of rubble growing and shrinking with the ages, until Cairo came, and the sponge was once again lifted up, into our bathroom, onto the bathtub’s rim where it now sits enigmatically, an endless stream of communication flowing between it and heaven.

I now realize I misspoke. The loofah could not belong to my roommate any more than the Rocky Mountains could belong to the United States. These kinds of things are not simply owned. Indeed, because the loofah oracle did not belong to me, I assumed it was my roommate’s and she likely assumes the same.

This is the wisdom of the oracle. It quietly leads us down paths of assumption, all the while safeguarding its own peace. It does not even pay the price of having to scrub elbows and backs and instead gently perfumes the air with knowledge, leading us to greater insights.

And today is the last day it gets a free ride. As far as I’m concerned, things are about to get exfoliated up in here. Just wait until the weather gets warm enough for everyday sandal wearing—I don’t care much for prophecies but I do need something to sand down the horns that grow on my feet. Thanks oracle!

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Mar 19 2012
54 Comments
Anecdotes, Three minute read

A Nerd Fights Her Destiny

The bane of the science classroom.

I spent most of sixth grade sucking up to my teachers by leaving them anonymous thank you notes along with homemade muffins. My social status suffered accordingly. The day before summer break, as I watched the popular crowd milling in the hallways, I promised myself seventh grade would be different. I would prance with the best of them. My yearbook would be so full of signatures  I would have to buy extra pages. I was going to be gloriously popular and it was going to be awesome.

Summer zoomed by, and all of the sudden I was stepping into my first class of seventh grade. Big changes were afoot. In the back of the classroom sat the cool girls, radiating indifference and social status, already discussing the coming weekend’s social happenings. Next to them was an empty chair. If I could just sit there, I and the cool girls would be BFFs and giggle together until we died. All of my dreams were coming true.

Suddenly I heard, “Emily! Emily! Sit up here!” It might as well have been the call of the grave.  Two friends from my former life as a frumpy nobody sat at the very front of the classroom and beckoned to me, as friends do. They were of my own social class, both of them nerdly and pleasant, but I was completely aware they could not help my popularity level.

Tempted by the familiar faces, I hesitated. I looked again to the vacant seat, longing to be next to the cool girls despite the fact I could almost  taste their animosity and knew I wasn’t welcome there. Overcome with fear, I finally turned towards my geeky and less good looking friends.

I wish I could say this was the deciding moment, that from then on I didn’t want to be popular. But I did, devastatingly so, and it was only my blinding cowardice that kept me from palming my old friends in the face and approaching the preening girls at the back.

I made my way to the front of the classroom where my fellow nobodys eagerly pulled a chair up to the head of the table, which jutted directly into the aisle. Mr. Harrington taught right behind me, and the extent of my back damage due to swiveling and craning is still unknown.

But I made the best of the awkwardness, and used my proximity to the teacher to ask an astonishing amount of ridiculously off topic questions, like “What is color?” in the middle of Ch.8: Rocks. Thankfully, because of my location and intense focus on Mr. Harrington, I never felt the weight of the class’s collective eye rolling.

Despite my initial disappointment, I was actually living out my dream of being the ultimate teacher’s pet as well as beginning my life as an attention monger. Soon this opportunity to nerd out mitigated my desire to chase popularity. Why sit in the back and put on lip gloss when I could lead an entire classroom on rabbit trails and goose chases? Though I still occasionally wished to be popular, I believe this class was the point at which I learned I was probably happier as a nerdy and obnoxious student than a social ladder climber. In the end, I couldn’t resist my destiny. Abercrombie would have to look elsewhere for new customers.*

*Full disclosure: I shopped at Abercrombie until sophomore year of high school. Oh the shame……

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