Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

I met my new therapist last week.  I test drove a few, and she was the one that stuck.  She seems like she's not going to let me get by with any bullshit, and she said a couple of things that zinged me in our very first meeting.  That was unexpected, delightful, and now, with time to think about it, terrifying. I've been doing so much soul searching lately, so much careful consideration of my life and where I am - you'd think I'd be finding myself, but instead I feel so completely lost.  A few reasons: 1. I sabotage relationships in a really predictable way.  I had always thought of this behavior in one way, but with one sentence, this woman last week made me question everything I thought about that.  It's good to question it; it's what I wanted, but to be confronted so quickly by something that I had never considered is frightening.  I've spent so much time trying to figure this stuff out, and it turns out that I've been so completely wrong about ...

Just after I wrote that stuff yesterday about how we wouldn't think Liz Lemon was as funny if Tina Fey herself were single, I run across a series of other posts from some of my favorite blogs about how Liz Lemon is not, as the series tries to pretend she is, ugly. "Liz Lemmoning": Isn't it time we all admit that Tina Fey is conventionally attractive? - From Jezebel.  They also mention Laney Boggs in this post, which is one of my all time pet peeves.  Give her glasses.  Yep, now she's ugly. Pretty ugly: Can we please stop pretending that beautiful women aren't beautiful? - From feministing.com

I've been thinking a lot about age lately, probably due to the unfortunate approach of my birthday. I think a large part of mulling this over so much is not about my actual age, but rather who and how I thought I'd be by the time I was this age. I had expectations, and those haven't exactly panned out. That's not actually a bad thing, as other good things have happened that I never could have predicted, but either way, I've been thinking it over a lot. And two recent observations have prompted further consideration: 1. I've been watching a lot of 30 Rock, as I am wont to do, and Liz's most recent lady problem is about her "Future Husband" for whom she has an entry in her phone contacts after oral surgery. Turns out his name is Wesley Snipes, a British fellow, and they hate each other. But no matter how much they try to escape this non-relationship, they keep meeting in unusual ways. Wesley decides that it's the universe's way of tell...

A friend of mine wrote on her Twitter that "do not engage" applied to many areas of her life, and she said it like it was a bad thing, but I honestly think that it might be some of the best wisdom I've heard in a while. Another very smart friend of mine also recently pointed out to me that sometimes not doing anything is about the best thing I can do. You see, someone told me on Friday that I am high strung. Really, me? High strung. Nah. This actually struck me as funny because I'm pretty sure it's a fact that everyone already knows. I think it goes along with how hard I push people and why my expectations are so high. I have similar expectations for myself, and I push myself even harder than anyone else. If that's what it means to be high strung, I guess I'm okay with that. However, sometimes it means that I push myself to make progress faster than I should. Stopping, not pushing myself to do something before I'm ready might be a really sma...

I am becoming an embittered, snobbish bitch, and I find that as I age, I don't really care so much. Optimism should be reserved for the girls in their early 20s that my ex-boyfriends date immediately after they break up with me. I am, at present, trying to transfer some of my feelings about family and relationships to my friends. I have a lot of great adult friends, and their inherent greatness was made evident to me yet again this Saturday in my fiction class. This is also how I know I'm a huge snob. My fiction class is a mixed bag of people because it's a Saturday "evening" class. There are other adults with full-time jobs, as well as regular students. It's an odd assortment, and I think that can be a good thing. It can also, at times, be quite painful. The level of discourse isn't always exactly what I would hope for. In order that I may not seem like a complete ass, I have compiled a list of things that people have never heard of: waiting for...

I just finished Ghost Town by Robert Coover last night for my class at 9 AM this morning. This is because I hated it. I started reading it on Monday, and every two pages, I'd make a grumpy face and put it down again. It jumps all over the place, trying to parody every single wild west stereotype. It does a pretty good job of addressing them at least: prostitute & schoolmarm (whore & virgin), sheriffs & interchangeable deputies, train robberies, cattle and accompanying rustlers, a rattlesnake in an empty skull, saloons, bar fights, tumbleweeds, good guys in white and bad guys in black, a jailbreak. I'm leaving quite a few things out, but trust me, it's all in there. All in 147 spastic, disconnected pages. It was episodic, much like the spaghetti westerns it's meant to parody, and it did have its high points. It's one of those books where I get what he was trying to do, but ultimately I just didn't care. One of the other students in my class p...