Land of Lakes and Volcanoes

Last night I hosted an Alie & Georgia cocktail birthday party. We went from 8 to 2 and tried 8 different cocktails. There was also ice cream cake and a hookah bc, well, I throw good parties, and Jeremy deserves nothing less. There would have been a fire pit, but something, something sleet. The fact that we only got to try 8 means there can be more Alie & Georgia parties in future bc there are so many left!  I would have included more pictures, but we were, uh, too distracted to take them.  And now, a review: Drunken Donuts Our first cocktail of the evening, I decided to serve these as little shots with a Spudnut garnish bc they are 2 parts alcohol to 1 part coffee. They contain staggering quantities of espresso vodka, coffee liqueur, and chocolate liqueur. A shot was about as much as you need, despite the recommended serving of a mug! of the stuff. This was our first hint that Alie & Georgia must be lushes with liver related super powers.  On a side no...

No, I did not finish the Tough Mudder.  Let's just get that awkward moment over with.  However, we did about half of it, and then I couldn't bend my knees without crying.  Before that, we engaged in a some outlandish behavior. We trudged up a ski slope I wouldn't ski down.  The hardcore kids were trudging too, so booyah.  We ran across some hay bales.  It was really fun. We jumped into, dunked under, and had to have people help us out of an industrial sized garbage can full of ice water.  That was the dumbest thing I've ever done, hands down.  I remember coming out the other side of the dunk, seeing someone, and saying, "How do I get out?" but I was talk-ing real-ly slow-ly.  I think I froze my brain. We went over a rope fence, and Nj was first.  This was after the ice water and she couldn't really feel her feet, so she was scared to go over.  On the other side, there were two shirtless beautiful Crossfitting men, so in a stunn...

Back in April, Sociological Images posted about some amazing graphics that very nicely show the level of economic inequality there is in the US.  At the time, I glanced over them briefly - it was a lot of stuff I'd seen / read about before, so I didn't get too blown away. However, given the OWS protests, something made me go back and look at the post more carefully, and I was surprised that the first sentence reveals that the source of the data for these images is The Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality . I was fascinated to learn that such a thing exists and it's a resource worth checking out if you want to know more about these issues than you're getting from the mainstream media, or if you need to explain to someone else what these are. Many of the statistics that OWS protestors are citing have either been generated by the center or are from there originally and there are a ton of additional resources there, including, but not limited to: Quic...

I almost never used to wear make-up, and I'll admit to being conflicted about using it now. On the one hand, it's fun and makes me feel girly and I like the way it makes me look. Also, it's necessary to any kind of adorable 40s/50s look, of which I'm a fan. On the other hand, I live in fear of getting to the point where I'm more comfortable with my face with makeup than without. The embracing of a kind of artificial, post-war, exaggerated feature beauty brings with it its own set of questions. However, given all that, I still gain a perverse amount of joy from watching the Jane Marie How to Be a Girl videos. Her attitude is hilarious and I think I like them bc she seems to be saying, "I'm doing this crap and it's fun and if you want to do it too, that's cool, but if you don't, that is also cool. Also, playing with colored eyeshadow is fun and you can put almost anything on your face, and if you work it, people won't think you're crazy...

Swiffer used to have a series of Wet Jet commercials in which a sad mop romantically (and vaguely stalkerishly) pursued a woman who just loves to mop.  So, like every other cleaning commercial the person cleaning is a woman, which is pretty standardly sexist, but now we have introduced a weird wooing dynamic into how we choose our cleaning products. And now the new commercials have personified dirt, mud, dust, etc. as women who are waiting to be picked up by a Swiffer product.  They've been left behind y other cleaning products and are now just waiting around in cracks and crevices for love to come find them.  Once again, the Swiffer product is the hero, the romantic champion, the alpha male of cleaning products.  It makes me never want to buy another Swiffer product ever again.

I haven't written much lately and it's been because I've been thinking a lot but about things I didn't really want to share with the internet.  I have been thinking about possibility and self-limitation.  While definitely not the impetus, there's a You Are Not So Smart article about the Benjamin Franklin Effect in which you ask someone for a favor and it makes them like you even if they didn't before.  Like most things on You Are Not So Smart, it's about mental limitations, our own and others'.  Which leads to a pre-revelation: I'm 30 and I'm still not really sure what I want to do with my life.  There's not revelatory because I'm not sure I've ever known what I want to do with my LIFE, but the big difference is that I used to feel like no matter what I actually did, not knowing made me a failure.  I mentally backed myself into a tiny little corner where the only options were what I'm doing (i.e. a life) or one path to a PhD an...