Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

Because it's important to have goals, here are some of the things we plan to do in NYC. Consider this a checklist. 1. Chinatown, lots and lots of Chinatown. 2. MoMA for some Bauhaus and Tim Burton and this . 3. Museum of Arts and Design , perhaps my favorite museum in NY. 4. Shopping in SoHo. This is all Lauren, but I'll watch and eat stuff. It'll be fun. 5. Walk the Brooklyn Bridge. Jess wants to do this and I'm all for freezing my butt off in the name of why-the-hell-not. 6. Baking cookies in the shape of body parts. Don't worry about it. 7. Maybe the Moth. Depends on how zonked we are from the travel. 8. Eat a lot. We're letting Sean be our guide here, but there will be pictures of tasty things that will prolong my drooling long after this trip is over. 9. Anything else NY throws at us. Count me in. I'm on vacation.

I am supposed to be waking up in 4 hours to head for Nueva York and instead I am just awake. Damn it all. So, a list. Things I am afraid of: 1. Making an idiot of myself. Full on idiot mode. Awesome. 2. Not doing things because I'm so afraid of making an idiot of myself. Less fun, more uncomfortable me. Lame. 3. Those signs on the interstate that say, "No one expects brain injury." I'm sorry, but wtf? I could not find a picture of this, thank goodness, because I wouldn't be able to look at it if I had. 4. Snakes. Despite being a biologist, I would be terrified to pick up this snake. Once it was in my hand, I'd be fine, but don't expect me to grab the damned thing. 5. Having what happened to my mom happen to me. Give money to the ALS Association . I mean it. 6. Just taking up space and leaving nothing of value behind when I go. So far, I'm working on positively influencing this tiny person:

I realized last night at my 10 year reunion how ridiculous the premise of Grosse Point Blank is. John Cusack, you weren't old. You weren't even close. Please stop acting like you were having a mid-life crisis at 28. Although, honest admission, when I saw this movie for the first time, I was a wee lass and I remember thinking, wow, Ten Year Reunion, he must be old. Thanks Hollywood, for skewing my age perception goggles. I'm better now. As the year windeth down, I've been doing to a little introspective retrospection, and have decided that I need to get. on. the. ball. One way to do this, I think, is to push myself to write more. Even if it's crap. This means finishing the NaNoWriMo novel, more blog postings (including going back to writing book reviews), and (my boss will be pleased) more academic writing. The last thing I had fun writing was my Spanish paper about reggaeton. Who would have thought that 9 pages in Spanish on Puerto Rican identity would ha

This list is a draft, but will be finalized by the time 2010 starts. Expect revisions. 1. Do something terrifyingly creative and exposing. See previous post about live music. Even if I get humiliated, I have got to do something to feel like I'm doing more than taking up space. 2. Become a certified South Carolina Barbeque Association judge. I'm not kidding. 3. Remember that people only really like you if you're not faking it. There are some specific actions I'm thinking about taking here, but they're privado. 4. Be a better friend. 5. Kick a bad habit I picked up this year. Said bad habit shall remain secret, but it's there, and all the wrong people know about it.

I have once again had the opportunity to consort with musicians. This is such a mixed emotional thing for me. I love it. It washes over me like a warm bath, but then afterward I get the chills when the residual droplets evaporate. Specifically, there's two things I covet about musicians (items to follow). You will notice that I use the word covet, which MW defines as "to wish for earnestly" or "to desire (what belongs to another)". In other words, musicians* inevitably have two things that I lack, but wish I had. So here they are: 1. Creativity - Explaining to you what watching someone make music is like for me would be impossible because it's not like any other feeling. It's miraculous and mysterious, in the truest un-watered down sense. And I don't create anything. My life is productive, functional, reasonably fulfilling, but not creative. The only way I know how to describe it is that I ended up crashing at a house of musicians, and it

People keep making Top 10 and Top 100 lists of the decade, and I was considering making a Top 10 Album list. Music for me is associated with a time, an event, a place, certain people, and so this question for a Top 10 made me think back about everything that's happened in the past decade, and I was kind of bowled over. I haven't been through anything impossible or even that unusual, but I'm pretty sure that if I look back when I'm 80, and make a histogram of my life, it will look something like this: So my Top 10 list is of life-changing events. I tried to put them in order of importance, but instead they are in order by when they occurred. In short, I am ready for this damned decade to be over. Denise's Top 10 Life-Changing Events of the Decade: 1. College / grad school 2. Keegan's birth 3. Getting married 4. Getting divorced 5. Living alone for the first time 6. Teaching high school 7. Dating someone who really saw me 8. Peace Corps 9. Mom's death 10.

“Just because you’re an atheist, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t love for things to have reasons for why they are.” p. 13 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close I was going to write a post today about reflections on my first semester teaching at MTC, but I guess that will have to wait because other things are weighing on my mind. I'm sitting alone in my apartment on this blustery, wintry day (I love this weather), and am letting my old demons visit me. I was hoping to put up my Christmas tree today, but the current guardian of my surplus goods was out of town for the weekend, so I have to wait until tomorrow. The roommate is also out of town, and the apartment is warm and quiet. It's cozy, comfortable, and sadly empty. This always happens to me. These days of freedom and silence always start out well. I feel happy and comfortable, contented in the world I've built for myself. However, the longer I am alone, the heavier the silence becomes until it no longer feels like a w