Boring and Exciting

Life has been a little slow...as soon as I got really excited about writing in my blog last week and this past weekend, things slowed down and I didn't really feel like writing or posting. I haven't even come across any interesting web sites.

However, I have been reading a very good book, called The History of Love, and spending my nights reading it. Its about writing, and living, and loving life so far, in a fictional story spun from Jewish immigrants.

Other than that, there is some exciting news in my life that is not to be shared in a place that is so public like the internet.

Getting Organized

Brentan and I are finally getting organized in the apartment, and we went to Ikea a few weeks ago to buy some new stuff for the apartment, including this white bookshelf. It is very modern and has clean lines, and was like something I saw in a design magazine, but is from Ikea, so it is cheap and you can see the screws when you look at it from the side (which I don't particularly like). The bookshelf and the mirror that we also got at Ikea almost didn't fit into our car, but after a few minutes of strategically pushing and shoving, we moved the front seats completely forward and fit them both in the car. By then the seats were so far forward that Brentan could barely fit in the seat with his knees up to his chin, and I had to drive back about 3 inches away from the steering wheel. It was a sight.

So nevertheless, the bookshelf has helped us get organized as you can see, with showcasing some of our wedding goods. My favorites are the green vase from Miss Emily A, and the glass cake platter on the lower shelf which I have already used for my birthday cake!

What I Wore Yesterday

Its a rainy rainy day today, that will probably turn into a rainy rainy weekend, so I thought I would post what I was wearing yesterday! I made this on polyvore yesterday, cause I didn't have a camera to take my picture, cause I though I looked pretty cute, especially in my pink high heels! The heels in the pic are not quite as cool as my own, but I couldn't find a picture online of the ones I have.


Why does it feel like I am so much more grown up wearing heels? Even tight, high, uncomfortable ones? That is one think I like about dressing for the office: heels!

Website of the Day: The Fail Blog

Brentan showed me a new cool website that I like. The Fail Blog. Pretty funny. And sometimes ironic.

Photography

I recently have been hankering to take some photos. Some real artsy, cutesy photos of interesting stuff and people. But my camera is dead.

I feel like I need a digital SLR to be good, but I don't really know the first thing about taking pictures! Can someone please just put a fancy camera in my hands, set me in front of a beautiful scene and teach me?

This was probably exacerbated by all the time I spent on Flickr yesterday looking at their Interestingness feature.

75 Books Women Should Read

Jezebel published a list of 75 books that women should read. I've bolded the ones I have read, and added a few at the bottom that I think women should read too!

• The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
• White Teeth, Zadie Smith
• The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
• Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
• Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
• The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
• Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
• The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
• Beloved, Toni Morrison
• Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
• Like Life, Lorrie Moore
• Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
• Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
• The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
• A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
• A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
• The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
• You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
• Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
• To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
• Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
• Earthly Paradise, Colette
• Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
• Property, Valerie Martin
• Middlemarch, George Eliot
• Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
• The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
• Runaway, Alice Munro
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
• The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
• Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
• You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
• Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
• Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
• The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
• A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
• And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
• Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
• The Secret History, Donna Tartt
• The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
• The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
• The Group, Mary McCarthy
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi- saw the movie, and it was fantastic!
• The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
• The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
• Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
• Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
• In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
• The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
• Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
• Three Junes, Julia Glass
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
• Sophie's Choice, William Styron
• Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
• Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
• Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
• The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
• The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
• The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
• My Antonia, Willa Cather
• Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
• Spending, Mary Gordon
• The Lover, Marguerite Duras
• The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
• Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
• Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
• Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
• Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
• I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
• Possession, A.S. Byatt

My picks:
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
Ahab's Wife, Sena Naslund
The Giver, Lois Lowry

I have so many more to read, like the foods I have to try! So many more things to experience in life...

What would you add? (Though I think my readership is mostly male, you can still add great books!)


Related: The Omnivore's 100

"The new Wall Street is Greenwich, Conn."

In "Dim Lights, Big City: For Young Financiers, Risk Hits Home" Alex Williams writes for the New York Times:

"Wall Street — and the fantasyland it helped create in New York — was likely to shrink even without a credit crisis.

'I hate to use the phrase ‘masters of the universe,’ but they’re not in investment banking anymore, they’re in hedge funds,' Mr. Wolfe said. And 'hedge funds don’t need glass office towers. They can run $15 billion with 25 people' in the leafy suburban sanctuaries where their directors live.

'The new Wall Street,' he said, 'is Greenwich, Conn.'

In a possible indication of night life to come, Mr. Gunderson and his girlfriend invited friends to their West Village apartment last week to 'party like it’s 1929.'"

The Mirrored Ceiling, and dwelling on Sarah Palin

I don't want to dwell too much about this Sarah Palin nomination thing, and by now, it is almost old news. But I found this great opinion article by Judith Warner in (where else) the New York Times: The Mirrored Ceiling.

Warner writes,
"But shouldn’t a woman who is prepared to be commander in chief be intimidating? Because of the intelligence, experience, talent and drive that got her there? If she isn’t, at least on some level, off-putting, if her presence inspires national commentary on breast-pumping and babysitting rather than health care reform and social security, then something is seriously wrong. If she doesn’t elicit at least some degree of awe, then something is missing."

Seriously, anyone in power should be awe-inspiring, sharp, and smart.

Links

Here are some links to what I have found interesting today:

Cake Wrecks- Mmm, chest hair post. Just what it sounds like. I love this blog.

New York Times- The King is Dead, by Roger Cohen. Opinion about college students getting over the i-banking/consulting thing after college. I am guilty, but agree with Cohen that young people should be thinking of things other than a quick buck. A Princeton grad is quoted as saying, "I mean, when I was a sophomore, if you could spell your name, you were guaranteed a job [at Merrill Lynch]." Wow. I mean, I know, but wow. These classmates of mine are helping run the largest companies.

I just love it! and NYC

I just love the Cherry Blossom Girl's website. The photography is beautiful, like the picture of Antwerp above.

Oh, it just inspires me to be a photographer. Which is a little difficult right now since my camera is b-r-o-k-e-n. So I don't have any photos from last weekend in New York, and there were so many great opportunities. The only photos I have are from my co-workers, and from my friends, so I just have to mooch off theirs. Like the one below, taken at a very awesome rooftop bar in midtown. The decor was 'tropical', if you can see the palm tree in the background. Stuffed exotic animals decorated the place too, like a zebra and leopard.
I also went to the MoMA, which was amazing. (I heart modern art!) They were showing an exhibit on Dali, which was VERY crowded. I watched a few of the videos that they had- one was a clip from Hitchcock's Spellbound, in which Dali created the sets for a dream sequence. Also, Dali collaborated with the Disney studios and was working on a Fantasia-like animated sequence which was never finished. In 2003 they finished it, based on Dali's drawings and storyboards. It is exactly what you would think a video of a cross between surrealism and modern animation would look like. Very cool. And I saw a roomful of Picassos, including Demoiselles d'Avignon, one of my favorite Picasso pieces. Ah. I was in art heaven.