I Want. . .

a wrap skirt. Having been inspired by Libby Dibby and by a conversation with Cheri, I really want to make a reversible wrap skirt.  And I think that this one will fit the bill.  Isn't it so me?  I especially love that 1) it's reversible and 2) it ties with a ribbon.  I'm thinking that I'll make one side in a light-weight denim / chambric and one side in a floral.  I'm hoping that I can get by without even making a trip to the fabric store; I'm thinking that I must have something in my stash of fabrics that will be suitable.  I think it'll be perf for teaching this summer.  And if it turns out well, I can see many wrap skirts to come, possibly in Amy Butler fabrics.  This looks to me like it will be a quickie project; maybe I can get one done before mom arrives for her visit next week.  I'm just so excited.

Goals

That last post about why I feel the need to post my summer reading has gotten me thinking more generally about goals for the summer. And I guess that this is as good a place as any to start to hash out some of that. I mean, there's a lot I'd like to get done over the summer (yoga, writing, sewing, painting my bedroom, lose weight), but it seems overwhelming just thinking about it, you know? And the problem (or a problem, anyway) that I tend to have is that I love, love, love setting goals, and I tend to set these ridiculously high, unrealistic goals, and then when I don't meet every single goal down to the last detail, I feel like a total failure. Please don't tell me how silly and unhealthy this sort of perfectionist thinking is--I'm well aware of it. Logically, I do see the problem here. This very tendency has recently made me a bit hesitant to set concrete goals of any sort. However, I always feel like if I have no goals, I won't make any sort of progress at all towards anything. At this juncture, I'm asking myself why I can't be OK with just "being," why I have to focus on the "becoming." I don't know how to answer those questions.

So it seems that I have a love/hate relationship with goals. On the one hand, I need them to feel OK about myself. But on the other hand, they clearly make me feel not OK about myself. Arrgh! Why does this have to be difficult? It sounds like I need a good therapist, doesn't it? Oh wait, the last therapist told me to dump all my friends because you all only valued me for my appearance, not for who I am on the inside. I don't know why, but this statement is especially ridiculous, IMO. I mean really--I'm not quite cute enough for that to be my only source of social currency. Oi.

So now that I've written about goals, I don't know where to go from here. Do I make a list of goals? Do I not? Fenway is especially lovey today--do I spend the day cuddling with him?

More on Summer Reading

Ok, I know that I'm obsessing about planning my summer reading.  I also know that probably noone cares, besides me.  And I'm fine with that.  I guess that I feel like in order to actually get anything done, I need to have goals.  And those goals seem real when I say them aloud, you know?  So here's my summer reading list, so far.  It needs to be prioritized somehow.  I haven't got to that yet.

Reading List, Summer 2009

In no particular order:

1.       Mrs. Dalloway

2.      An Abundance of Katherines

3.      Old Curiousity Shop

4.      Finish Dalgleish novels

5.      To the Lighthoues

6.      Harry Potter Series

7.      The Waves

8.      Woman in White

9.      Till We Have Faces

10.  Graveyard Book

11.  Thackery

12.  Trollope

13.  Eliot

14.  Forsyte Saga

So this’ll work if I read one book / week.  Oh, except for that HP is one entry.

Then, plus I have all that feminist theory I’m supposed to be reading.

LT Creates Jewelry on Etsy

Ok, so I wanted to give a little "shout out" to LT Creates Jewelry on Etsy.  Etsy.com , as you may know, is a web site where individuals sell their hand made wares (or sometimes, just craft supplies).  I think it's such a fab web site, and I love looking at what people are making.  However, I've only ordered anything once or twice.  But there's this great vendor who makes and sells jewelry from vintage silver-plated flatware.  Her work is really, really nice in my opinion.  After C. got a spoon watch from LT, I was ready to go ahead an place my order.  I got a spoon watch and matching spoon bracelet.  You can see a pic of the watch above.  The bracelet I got is identical, except that instead of the watch face, it has a turquoise bead.  I love both pieces, but if I had to pick one, I'd probably say that I actually like the bracelet best.  The pictures here and on Etsy really don't do the pieces justice--they are much prettier in person.  You send LT your wrist measurement, and she custom sizes them.  And I just love, love, love that this is vintage 1940s silverware that's been repurposed; that idea really appeals to me.  I ordered online and had the pieces in hand in less than a week.  And I think the prices are quite reasonable.  The only drawback IMO is that they are both somewhat difficult to clasp.  The clasp is large, and I'm sure that the piece is secure while one is wearing it, but it's a bit difficult to negoiate.

More on Summer Reading

So I guess that if I'm going to "do" the 19th century English novel this summer, I should throw in some Trollope, Thackeray, and Eliot.  This is starting to feel overwhelming.  But then again, I have always wanted to read at least one novel from each of the three aforementioned writers.  And maybe I can wrap it all up with Galsworthy's Forsyte novels, which I know are really 20th century.  But they feel like a commentary on Victorian society, don't they?.  Oi.  I'm losing control over my summer reading list.  And it's only 16 May!

#10 on summer reading list

Gaiman's Graveyard Book.  Am dying (pun! pun!) to read this one. 

My Summer Reading List--A New Take on the Thursday Thirteen

Ok, so last night, I was lying in bed, watching Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on DVD, and man I love that movie.  And I had a really good idea for today's T13.  Well, clearly I should have written it down, becuase I've totally forgotten it.  (You may note that I'm making an effort to post more regularly--this is part of a larger effort on my part to simply write more regularly.)

Anyhow, I'm working on putting together a summer reading list, so I thought this could be a collaborative T13.  You know, I'll start, and if any of y'all have suggestions, please contribute in the comments section.  So my "theme" for my summer reading list is this:  Virginia Woolf, 19th century novels, murder mysteries, lots of quickie YA lit, and rereads (this could include Harry Potter and JRR Tolkien).  Ok, so that's not really much of a theme, nor is there a lot of unity there.  I guess the connection is basically stuff Drennan reads for fun but doesn't HAVE to read for work.  So your suggestions should fall into one of the aforementioned categories. 

1.  Mrs. Dalloway (obviously Virginia Wolf, but also a reread)

2.  John Green's An Abundance of Katherines (YA, although not trashy like so many YA reads)

3.  Dickens's Old Curiousity Shop  (19th century)

4.  Finish PD James's Dalgelish series of novels (murder mystery)

5.  To the Lighthouse (also Virginai Wolf and reread)

6.  Harry Potter series (yes, the whole thing.  Do you think I can do it in 2 weeks?)

7.  The Waves (Virginia Wolf again, but not a reread)

8.  The Woman in White by Collins (which I've already started--19th Century)

And that's it of the top of my head.  Oh wait.

9.  CS Lewis's Till We Have Faces (definitely a rearead but an old favorite)

Ok, so that's really it--can you give me four more so I can get to 13?????

John Green--The Next Big Thing in YA Lit

So my considered (dare I say "expert") opinion is that John Green is the next big thing in young adult lit.  And seriously, I'm making a career out of reading YA lit.;  So here's the break down:

A couple of weeks ago, I read Green's Looking for Alaska.  This novel was published in 2005, and many critics have, apparently, compared it to Catcher in the Rye, which I think is highly overrated.  But maybe that's just me.  So Looking for Alaska was not wonderful, didn't change my life, but it was very good.  And I read a lot of YA lit, and most of it is crap.  I've been reading some of the Gossip Girl series, and seriously, those are so very vapid that 48 hours later, I can't even remember what the books were about.  So to find contemporary YA novels that are actually meaningful is always exciting and refreshing.  So basically the novel follows a nerdy protagonist Miles (oh, he's obsessed with "last words" that is, what people say on their deathbeds) as he goes away to boarding school.  He soon meets Alaska, with whom he promptly falls hopelessly in love.  Alaska is far too cool for our protagonist, but he becomes friends with her.  And I supppose that the novel is about Miles's attempt to really understand Alaska, but it becomes his attempt to find himself.  And maybe what he finds is, in part, that other people are unknowable.  I like Miles, as a character, and maybe that's just because, as some of you know, I just really tend to like nerdy men.  Miles feels familiar and irresistable.  A librarian colleague of mine says that the book glorifies underage drinking and sex and such.  I would say it's not so much a glorification as an authentic representation of teenage behavior.  And that's certainly not to say that all teens behave like Miles (or more accurately, Miles's friends), nor am I saying that it's acceptable behavior.  It just is.

Green's second novel is titled An Abundance of Katherines.  It is high on my reading list, along with The Old Curiosity Shop.  That seems like an odd paring.

Yesterday, I read Green's Paper Towns, his latest work.  I have to say that although I enjoyed it and appreciated it, it felt a lot like Looking for Alaska.  Here we have another nerdy teenage protagonist, Quintin, or Q.  He's hopelessly in love with Margo, the too-cool chick next door.  Like Alaska, this young woman is unobtainable but also incredibly troubled.  And Q. feels the need to save her, in a very literal sense.  In his quest to save Margo, Q. grapples with the problem of our inability to really understand or even know another person.

I say that Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska are alike, and they are.  Maybe that shouldn't detract from our ultimate enjoyment of these novels.  Green's protagonists are lovable, nerdy teenagers, on the cusp of adulthood, and they are dealing with questions that certainly seem universal.  And while they may not find the answers they hope for, the novels move toward finding meaning in our relationship with the world around us.  This seems to me to be an essentially optimistic way of looking at life and and young adulthood.  In the world dominated by Gossip Girl and the Princess Diaries, I'll take Green's novels any day.

A few more fun facts about John Green and his work:  Apparently the rights to all three novels have been purchased by movie studios, and Green is currently writing a screen play of Paper Towns.  Green can be seen weekly on YouTube, where he and his brother, post vlogs directed towards the "nerdfighters," their loyal followers.  Green also owns Willie, who is quite possibly the fourth cutest dog in the world, after my Bostons, of course.

Reflections on a Sick Day

So on Sunday, I had a fever and body aches for most of the day.  And despite my initial panic related to swone flu, I now seem to have recovered.  But yesterday, Monday, I stayed home from work.  I should add that there was no real reason I needed to go into work.  We're in final exam week, and I didn't have any finals to administer on Monday.  So a sick day, a do nothing day seemed in order.

One thing I did with my sick day was to get caught up on some reading I'd been meaning to do.  I read the first 150 or so pages of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White.  Collins is a contemporary of Dickens and writes in the same sort of way.  Anyway, here's something I've noticed only recently:  I really, really enjoy the Victorian "triple decker" novel.  This is worthy of comment only because for years I maintained that, with a few notable exceptions, the long, Dickensian novel was not for me.  And Dickens himself rather annoyed me, with the exception of A Christmas Carol.  But last summer, I read Collins's The Moonstone and enjoyed it.  I also read Dickens's Bleak House, not so much because I wanted to but because I thought it was something I should read at least once in my life.  Much to my amazement, I really, really enjoyed Bleak House and would like to move on to either The Old Curiosity Shop or Our Mutual Friend.  So do our reading tastes change as we get older?  When I think of the books I really, really loved as a child and young adult, I know that I still really, really love these works--The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Frankenstein, The Wind in the Willows, Little House in the Big Woods, which is by the way the first chapter book I read at the ripe old age of six.  But I'm also finding that I'm growing to love works that didn't appeal to me, not at all, when I was younger.