I’ve moved!

My new home!

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Help?

I’m trying to design a new blog page for myself on Blogspot.  I’m sick of this template and that I’m not allowed to change it on WordPress, but CSS is hard to learn, and I’m lazy.  If anyone knows how to do things and wants to help me, then by all means…

One day I will have a garden overgrown with gerbera daisies.

And, I think you should all listen to “Jolene” by Ray LaMontagne, because it’s beautiful.  Favorite line: “A man needs something he can hold onto / a nine-pound hammer, or a woman like you.”

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Rain, Kundera

‘Twas a cold, rainy day today, though I managed to crawl out of my warm bed and work at the store. It was quiet but I was content drinking coffee from my travel mug and playing around with the displays until Marissa joined me. Days like these make me excited to wear sweaters and drink hot coffee and, when I get home, immediately change into my sweatpants and throw a blanket around my shoulders.

For some reason, I’m really excited that it’s the weekend, even though I’ll be working both days. Sushi tonight and then drinks with friends, though. What are your plans?

Here is a passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being to keep you warm:

No, it was not superstition, it was a sense of beauty that cured her of her depression and imbued her with a new will to live. The birds of fortuity had alighted once more on her shoulders. There were tears in her eyes, and she was unutterably happy to hear him breathing at her side.

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Oh, poor thing

Julie Powell is an inspiration to all bloggers

Just came back from seeing “Julie & Julia” – a feel-good summer movie.  Maybe I should figure out what I really love in this world more than anything and start blogging about that.  Then literary agents and publishers will court me, I’ll write a book, and I can choose whomever I want to play me in a movie.

Julie Powell (as portrayed by Amy Adams) also made me wonder if anyone is actually reading this thing.  She said that for every one of her readers who comment, there must be one hundred readers who aren’t commenting.  Somehow I don’t think that’s the case here, but nonetheless, are you out there readers? Soon I shall find my life’s passion and this blog will be much more interesting to read. Bear with me until then.

Oh, and I made Martha Stewart’s Double Chocolate Brownies yesterday (sans the glass of milk) for Val’s going away party and for my mom, who had a rough week at work.  I wasn’t quite in the mood for something so rich, but everyone else was very happy with them.

“The wrong egg is in the nest.” -My mom

We took my little brother up to Colgate University on Thursday, where he is now a freshman. It was a sad, surreal day. The house is quiet without him, and the omnipresent, smiling college students welcoming us to Colgate only reinforced the depressing fact that I’ve graduated. This is why I plan to become a professor, so I can go to college forever. Above is the lake at the base of Colgate (the entire campus is built on a hill) and here are Sam and I outside of his dorm.

Reading list for the Indian summer

“It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don’t know what’s coming next is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection. In truth, the moment at which life really does become locked down, most of us are overcome by the desire to break it all apart again so that we can reexperience the variables of youth.”

As a just-because gift, my grandma sent me Ann Patchett’s, “What Now?”, an essay based off of Patchett’s commencement speech at Sarah Lawrence.  I read Patchett’s novel, Bel Canto, for my fiction class last fall and loved the dreamlike omniscient voice and beautiful attention to details.  “What Now?” reads just as easily while delivering some funny and refreshing takes on how to answer the dreaded title question.  It provided me, at least, with a solace in being uncertain about my future.  “What now is not just a panic-stricked question tossed out into a dark unknown,” Patchett writes.  “What now can also be out joy… It acknowledges that our future is open, that we may well do more than anyone expected of us, that at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.”

I have been otherwise lazy with my reading these days – once I start a book, I usually can’t put it down, but it’s a matter of getting myself to get through the first few pages when I know there are more episodes of True Blood to be watched. My mom bought me a cute “Books to Check Out” journal, though, and here are a few books I’ve jotted down:

• Barbara Kinsolver, Prodigal Summer
• Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
• Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees
• Dave Eggers, Zeitoun

Can anyone attest to these, or does anyone have more book recommendations?

Now, some important stuff

When work was slow today, I read this week’s New York Times Magazine. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryn WuDunn, career-long devotees to worldwide women’s rights, wrote the inspiring feature article. They tell the stories of women from various developing countries, like Abba Be, who traveled to New Delhi to work as a maid and instead was sold into slavery at a brothel, where she was gang-raped, beaten, and forced into prostitution. She witnessed the brutal killings of numerous women who didn’t do what customers would ask of them. Kristof and WuDunn then spend the majority of the article arguing that educating and employing women is the key to mending so many issues crippling the developing world, widespread poverty and health epidemics. They write about the importance of microfinance loans too, which are small loans for women to start their own businesses and have proven to make huge differences in developing areas. My rambling doesn’t do the article justice, so if you have twenty minutes, read it.

It made me anxious and excited for my trip to Malawi.  I’ll be there from January to March, volunteering partly at the Kwithu Women’s Group and Feeding Center in Mzuzu. The center provides assistance to orphaned children, many of whom have lost their parents to AIDS and HIV, while employing and empowering local women. The larger organization that runs Kwithu is called Maloto, and I strongly urge everyone to take a look at the website. It was created by Anna Keys, a Malawi-native who now resides in my hometown outside of New York City. She’s devoted her life to helping women and children in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, and now she’s created Mzuzu Academy, an internationally accredited secondary school. I’ll be traveling to Malawi and living with Anna, working with the local women and children and assisting with the various tasks needed for the inception of the school. She’s an incredible woman and Maloto is in dire need of donations. The school was supposed to open this September, but due to a lack of funding, it’s opening was pushed back until Fall of 2010. I know we’re all pinching pennies right now, but even an extra five dollars would go a long way.

The post-grad blues

If I were still in Chi O, I’d get myself these Wise Guys.

The do-it-your-self paper owls are among the cuter owl chachkes I’ve come across (and believe me, no Chi O is in short supply of owl chachkes). You lucky little hooters should pick some up – or apparently, download online – for only one British pound (and I’m referring to you as lucky because you’re the ones going back to school in less than a week. Bitches.).
Wise Guys discovered at Mixed Plate, a new favorite.

Speaking of owls, here’s a far creepier one that rivals the giant lamp that my friend’s mom found on the side of the road.

This is a less favorite piece found on Poppy Talk Handmade, an online marketplace with a different theme every month. For September, it’s “School Days.” Pardon me for taking out their exclamation point. Some of us don’t get to buy new pencil cases and planners this time around.

Fall. Sigh.

Are you having a tough day? Just be happy you aren’t this woman.

The Gap has great comfy classics this fall, as usual, like boyfriend sweaters, wool shrugs, and this slouchy oxford (okay, we’re all allowed a little vanity from time to time, right?).  It’s amazingly soft and I can’t wait to wear it tucked into a skirt at work with a big brown belt or loose over dark skinnies on a lazy Saturday (I’m thinking of getting myself some Sperrys to complete this look).  Speaking of work, I’m also terribly excited that I’m making money again and can thus afford to shop.  I mean, I could be saving up from grad school or other practical things…but that’s no fun.

Fall is also the season of the best activities, ever. Apple picking, pumpkin picking, jumping into leaves, haunted hayrides (not that I go on those, but people like them), Halloween (last year my friends and I were homemade crayons and our outfits were far better than the other girls who had the same idea) and all the fun-size candy that comes with it, and my favorite holiday, Thanksgiving. A day when nothing is expected but to spend time with family and stuff your face. Get excited for sweater weather and hot apple cider, kiddies.