August 11, 2007
Getting to know you...
It seems that that whole 5 questions interview thing is going around again, and I'm a sucker for not having to think about what to talk about, so I'm doing it. In fact, I requested questions from two people, and if you request questions from me and then do it yourself, I'll probably ask for some in return.
Here's how it goes:
1. Leave me a comment and I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
2. Update your website or blog or LJ or whatever with the answers to the questions.
3. Include this explanation and when others comment asking to be asked, you in turn ask them five questions.
**REMINDER: This isn't LJ--if you comment asking for questions, you won't get an email in response when I answer you, you'll have to remember to check back here.
And here are Amanda's questions for me:
1) When an artifact from your childhood (like a certain type of toy, or a television or book series) enjoys a resurgence in popularity, does it make you feel happy and nostalgic or angry and nostalgic? Why?
2) Are you still pursuing rabbinical school? If so, how is that coming along? If not, why did you decide to put that goal on the backburner?
3) I just read on your deliciously.org 'blog that you are a Harry Potter fan. What is your opinion of the last book? What, if anything, would you have changed about the outcome?
4) If you had to change your name, what alternate name would you select? Do you feel intimately connected to your name?
5) What cancelled television program do you wish could be revived (or, if you'd rather, would have lasted longer in the first place)?
Answers after the cut, and yes, obviously, #3 will have spoilers for Harry Potter. Answers to Carly's questions coming in a post soon.
1) When an artifact from your childhood (like a certain type of toy, or a television or book series) enjoys a resurgence in popularity, does it make you feel happy and nostalgic or angry and nostalgic? Why?
This may make me a horrible person, but I usually feel angry. It's the same feeling I get when someone tells me that they're a fan of Rent but I find out they've never seen the play or they didn't see it for the first time until years after I did. I don't really do anything with Rent anymore, but did they sleep out on the sidewalk every Tuesday for an entire summer to see the show? No, I don't think so. Bite me. Anyway, my point is, I get very possessive. I end up feeling like the kids who get to enjoy it now Just Don't Get what it really is all about. Plus, all too often, it's altered to be rereleased, which I just can't stand.
2) Are you still pursuing rabbinical school? If so, how is that coming along? If not, why did you decide to put that goal on the backburner?
Carly asked me this too, so I know it must be glaringly obvious that I haven't talked about it in awhile. There are basically two answers to this question. The first answer is that I'm not pursuing anything except breathing right now. I am currently deep in the trenches of figuring out if I can ever work, if I can ever be a parent, if I can ever be anything other than a resource draining lump. And if I sound depressed there, it's because I am. I'm really pretty unhappy about where I'm at on this whole journey and issue but basically... I have no plans or lack of plans.
The second answer is... IF I got to a place where I feel like I can work and I do decide to pursue a career path... The rabbinate is still really really appealing to me. I feel like the actual schooling is a terrific fit for me. I also feel like I really don't want to live in Philly for six years, and having lived somewhere I was miserable last year and now being back here, I'm not sure I'd give up six years living somewhere else for anything. I might. I really don't know. But that leads me to the last issue... I had forgotten, while I was in Oberlin, just HOW much I hate the Jewish community in the Twin Cities. Being back here, Judaism has been much less a part of my life, even internally. I don't like the community or the synagogues or the people I'd be working with. And if I want to live here long term (which... I think we do), there's really no point in being a rabbi because I would never want to work in this community. Right now for me, Judaism is really... whatever the opposite of salient is.
So in sum? I have no idea. It's not off the list of possibilities, it's still the thing I would most like to do. But it's not likely.
3) I just read on your deliciously.org 'blog that you are a Harry Potter fan. What is your opinion of the last book? What, if anything, would you have changed about the outcome?
Wifey, if you're reading this, just skip to the next question. Basically I feel like JK Rowling set herself up for failure. There's no way she could have pleased me. I feel like Harry should have died. However, if he had, I'd have been pissed as hell. I do feel, though, that at the very least he should have been the one to deliver the curse that killed Voldemort, but what can ya do? I feel like the pacing of the book was really bad. I missed that heart attack-y feeling from book six. I thought the ENTIRE plot about the Hallows was unnecessary and served absolutely zero purpose. I hated the exposition scene with Dumbledore in "King's Cross" and I didn't really care for the Snape/Lily chapter. I loved Ron and Hermione and seeing some growth in them. I love love love love Neville, and almost as much, I love Luna. I loved Kreacher. I loved HOW Ron and Hermione finally got together. I wanted a lot more Snape. I never liked him, in any book, but I wanted more. I was really underwhelmed, and I don't even like action books. That said? I don't think she could have written anything that I would have liked and I don't think any outcome would have satisfied me (although it's very hard to believe it was a truly horrific war with so few deaths). I wouldn't mind nixing that terrible epilogue. And I just have to say, best part of the WHOLE book was Molly coming at Bellatrix and calling her a bitch. It's really sad, though, when the death I was most upset about was Dobby's, when I hated him so much all along.
4) If you had to change your name, what alternate name would you select? Do you feel intimately connected to your name?
I do feel intimately connected to my name. There are times as a kid where I wished I had the last name Rozenberg (my mom's maiden name) instead of Feldman, and I collect long lists of names that I love, but I've never wished I had an actual different name. I used to want something more unique, but I couldn't tell you what, because to me, I am Rebecca. However, I was almost named Rivkah Michal (reev-kah mee-chal, ch being that hard h sound), which is my Hebrew name, and I would be content with that as my name too. That's not really a change, though, is it? There are names I love, but none of them are ME.
5) What cancelled television program do you wish could be revived (or, if you'd rather, would have lasted longer in the first place)?
There are two-- My So-Called Life and Popular. MSCL had so much to offer and I think it was going to go places that teen shows at the time hadn't gone (and maybe still haven't?). It deserved a longer life. I think it could have made a real impact, bigger than it did. Popular was just hilarious and clever and entertaining and I would love to see more.
Posted to Books & Hardly Working & Jew-mania & Mental Health & Mindless Entertainment & Miscellaneous & Nostalgia at 12:27 PM | Comments (3)
July 14, 2007
Books are always a good starting point
Hello, from out of nowhere. Yes, I know, how many times will I attempt to revive this site? Who knows, I refuse to give up. I've had my own site since I was 14; I'm not stopping now. If I have to, I'll post nothing but links until I have something else to say, but I think it would be good for me to keep this thing up and running.
So my goal is to post again this week, because starting Friday at midnight, I go into hibernation. I do not want a single solitary spoiler about the last Harry Potter book, nothing, not even how many pages it's going to be or what the cover looks like, until that book is in my hands. And because Lauren and I buy one copy and she reads it first, I have to sequester myself for quite awhile before I get to read it. I'm hoping she'll read it over the weekend and I can read it Monday and Tuesday, but we'll see. In any case, I won't be even logging onto AIM or LiveJournal from the time the book is released until I finish it.
We were supposed to see the fifth movie at midnight on Tuesday, just like every other movie so far, even though I've been unimpressed by most of them. So wouldn't it figure that both of us got stupidly sick on Tuesday afternoon. We're both still sick, and let me tell you, I don't know if this is a bug or a summer cold or what, but it's the worst I've felt in a long, long time. I'm still anxiously waiting to get to see the fifth movie... But today I did start rereading the sixth book, as a refresher before the final book. And wow, I forgot how good they are. I'm only two chapters in and my heart is racing already. And I'm NOT a fan of suspense, usually. But wow. I'm excited.
Yeah, I have Harry Potter fever. I'm ridiculous. And I'm excited.
So there, I found something to say, something inane and pointless, but this site is back up. Hopefully this won't be the only entry this week. And hopefully deliciously will wake back up, and so will I.
Posted to Books at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)
July 27, 2006
That's 25,017 pages.
You are now reading the journal of a girl who has, in the last 4 months, read EVERY SINGLE regular Baby-sitters Club book in order. That's 131 regular books, 15 super specials, 9 portrait series books, and 14 Friends Forever books. That's 169 books. That's 25,017 pages. It took me longer than I expected it to. I got held up a few times by not being able to find certain books or by books taking longer to ship to me than they should have. I even got held up a few times by, you know, REAL LIFE.
And now I'm done. And my life can resume. I can even read a real book again, one written for adults.
Feel free to take bets on whether or not that'll happen.
Posted to Books at 07:31 PM | Comments (5)
July 12, 2006
Can a person be eaten by books?
The last few times we moved, the first thing I unpacked was our books. I absolutely love seeing our bookcase go from stacks and stacks of books that look like they're taking over our lives to relatively tamed rows of book spines. I always feel like a magician.
But not this time.
We've been living in our current apartment for two weeks today, and I'm just now tackling our bookshelf. That's because the entire time we were in Oberlin, we didn't buy a single thing without getting rid of whatever we were replacing, like our pots and pans or our silverware. Except books. Lots and lots of books.
I don't know how it happened. I know I brought a few books back from my parents' house over winter break. I know that we bought a couple books at RRC during our November visit. I think we bought a few novels throughout the year. Somehow, there are more than just a few new books, though. There are enough that I'm totally lost as to how to make them fit on our bookshelf. I've already had to dispense with my old plan for the order they go on the shelves (cookbooks -> domestic related books -> Jewish books -> books about other spiritual practices -> self-help books -> women-empowerment related books -> women's autobiographies -> gender studies books -> other textbooks about women -> psych textbooks -> random textbooks -> reference books -> communication textbooks -> student affairs textbooks -> floofy "change the world" books -> decorating and crafts books [not the best transition, I admit, but it always started a new shelf] -> literature). Now, I'm planless.
And this overflow is not even counting my BSC books, which are on a different shelf altogether!
We need bookends. And another bookcase. And more space.
Maybe a normal person would say "we need fewer books." Hmm.
No way.
Posted to Books at 12:25 PM | Comments (2)
July 10, 2006
BSC + Minneapolis = love
It's been about three months since I began my quest to read every single BSC book in order. Instead of reading them all in one weekend, I've been taking my sweet time. I don't know what I was thinking; there's no way I could do nothing but read these books nonstop for three days. The later books are horrible!
Tonight I got to Super Special #14, BSC in the USA, wherein the club members go on a cross-country road trip. My ritual for reading Super Specials is to begin by looking through the book at all the pictures, and when I did that for this book, I saw Mary Anne and an older woman sitting on a carnival type ride. Using my AMAZING powers of deduction, I reasoned that the woman next to her must be her grandmother, who lives in Iowa. And on the page next to that picture was the word "mall." A mall near Iowa with rides in it?
THE BSC GOES TO MINNEAPOLIS! It looks like they only stop off at the Metrodome and the Mall of America, which is not what I would portray to young readers if I was going to write about Minneapolis, but still... How did I not know about this before??
I'm so psyched to start reading.
Posted to Books & Minnesota at 08:07 PM | Comments (1)
May 26, 2006
dress to impress
Today I'm reading Kristy and the Baby Parade, which I remember as being one of my least favorite BSC books ever. And so far, that memory seems warranted. It's boring. I've been trying to speed-read through it (although to be honest, the next book, Mary Anne Misses Logan, isn't exactly a favorite of mine either) but it feels like it's taking forever.
But I just read something that made it all worth it.
See, one of my favorite elements of the BSC books was always when they described Claudia's clothing. I never noticed as a kid that they said things like "on anyone else, that would look stupid, but on Claudia, it looked great." All I knew was that Claudia was COOL and ARTISTIC and dressed WILDLY. And as I've been rereading these books, I've been cracking up at all the clothes and wondering why I thought they were so cool.
This book, though, has my favorite outfit in it. My VERY favorite. I remember reading about it and trying to recreate it and drawing it and loving it to death. So what was this magical outfit?
An oversized red button-down shirt with big black buttons, green leggings with white tie-dyed streaks (I always pictured those ribbed leggings that were really popular in the late 80s, for some reason--green with white stripes that looked like rings around her legs. I think I knew someone with pants like that.), and earrings that looked like watermelon slices. Because she was a WATERMELON.
How hot is that?
Posted to Books & Nostalgia at 11:30 AM | Comments (1)
May 10, 2006
Confronting my past
As I've mentioned about a million times, right now I'm reading all the BSC books in order. Today I read #32, Kristy and the Secret of Susan. I have to admit that ever since I started this venture, I've been anxious to get to this book, wondering what I'd think of it now.
When I first read Kristy and the Secret of Susan in 1990, it was the first time I'd heard of autism. I was fascinated. I decided, at 9 years old, that I wanted to work with autistic kids someday. That interest never disappeared. There was something I couldn't put my finger on about autism that made my stomach turn.
I didn't retain a lot of the actual information in that book, and now that I've reread it, I'm surprised that Ann M. Martin was willing to depict Susan the way she did. For most of the book, it appeared that Susan's life was pretty hopeless. It wasn't until the very end that Kristy understood that just because Susan was too developmentally needy to even go to a special ed day school didn't mean that her parents didn't hold out hope for her life. The book was clear that not all autistic children are savants, that IQ is pretty secondary, and that autistic kids have varying levels of communication abilities. The only thing the book left out, as far as I'm concerned, is how violent autistic kids can be when that's the only way they know how to communicate.
But somehow, reading it this time while understanding why I was so interested as a kid was a little depressing. A teensy bit of that is because I don't feel that great about having a disability that affects me so much, but more than that, I feel that desperate "no one will ever understand what it's like to be me" feeling that has made me feel so isolated on and off for my entire life. I know that everyone feels that way sometimes, but knowing that I have a disorder that my wife and friends will never really GET can be frustrating.
I'm glad I reread this book, but I don't think I'll be reading it again any time soon. I'm especially glad that I was introduced to autism this way when I was young, though. It was important for me. It made the whole thing less scary when Aspergers became a reality for me.
After all, if Ann M. Martin covered it, it couldn't be TOO horrible.
Posted to Books & Mental Health & Nostalgia at 12:44 PM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2006
Perspective
I'm destined to be a crotchety old woman, probably by the time I'm 28. I say a lot of stuff that sounds like "kids these days" and "what is the world coming to" already. I talk a lot about how much current pop culture and fashion suck, and I contemplate the changes in pricing in my lifetime on EVERYTHING.
So when I read this, in Baby-Sitters Club #3 (published in 1986):
"A small tab and a small popcorn, please," I said.
"That'll be a dollar seventy-five," replied the boy behind the counter.
I gulped. I'd forgotten how expensive things were in New York. At the theater in Stoneybrook, you can get a soda and popcorn for ninety-five cents.
I almost died. What's the world coming to?
Posted to Books & Nostalgia at 06:31 PM | Comments (1)
March 24, 2006
Feel free to send your contributions...
I have this fantasy that I just can't let go of...
In this fantasy, I own EVERY SINGLE Baby-Sitters Club book, numbers 1 through 131, plus all 12 super specials. I sit down one Friday afternoon, pick up Kristy's Great Idea, and start reading. I don't stop reading, except to sleep and to get myself a little ice cream, until I've finished The Fire at Mary Anne's House. I figure out in advance where the super specials fit into the series using my old trick of looking at the beginning to see which books are listed as already published at that point.
And maybe, just maybe, I even read the Baby-Sitters Club Friends Forever series.
This dream will probably never be realized. It seems that it's nearly impossible to find the older books, and although I don't remember giving my permission for this, my collection of the first 63 books seems to have disappeared from my parents' house. But I'm dying to reread them. I'm dying to find out what happened that caused Dawn to move back to California, what made some Jewish girl named Abby join the club, and why Mallory went to boarding school.
I started reading the BSC books in 1987, when they were first published. My baubie worked at Target for awhile, and she got them for me as soon as they came out. This continued on long after my peers had moved on to R.L. Stine books, because as with most things in my life, I just plain Could Not Let Go. Most people my age stopped reading somewhere around 39, Poor Mallory. Not me. I kept on going until my sources had dried up and I had no way of acquiring the books. And until my senior year of college, I could list the titles of the first 44 books IN ORDER, from memory.
And now, 13 years after I stopped reading, I'm still tortured by my curiosity about the fate of my five favorite girls (I was never much of a fan of Mallory or Jessi's). Too bad there aren't any used bookstores around here where we can go to try and scrounge them up...
Posted to Books at 09:30 PM | Comments (5)
January 18, 2006
Everyone should go read Beggars in Spain. It's very good.
I hate that time in between finishing one book and starting the next. Especially when they're part of a series, so you don't quite have closure.
A few years ago, Elena recommended a book to me called Beggars in Spain. I read it right away, and I fell in love. It was definitely one of the best non-young-adult books I've ever read. Shortly afterward, I bought the sequel, Beggars and Choosers, but despite multiple efforts to get through it, I never made it past page 50. It's such a different book from the first, and not nearly as intriguing of a concept.
Last week I finally read it. Once I got past the initial stuff that had always bored me in previous attempts, I actually really enjoyed it. It really is totally different than the first book, with a focus on plot more than character (hear that? I read a book with a PLOT), but it was good.
And then I discovered that there's a third book, Beggars Ride.
So now I'm anxiously awaiting the third book. I bought it from amazon, using the free shipping option, which means it could be quite awhile before it gets here. And if I'm smart, I'll save it for my upcoming trip to San Diego, since I don't have any other books to read (except a pregnancy book, which I think would freak my family out pretty badly).
I do hate this feeling, though. I hate finishing a good book enough as it is, but knowing a follow-up is looming but unavailable sucks.
I'm such a nerd.
Posted to Books at 11:24 PM | Comments (2)
December 10, 2005
Now you'll find out how nerdy I REALLY am
I have discovered heaven. True, pure heaven.
One of my crazy fears -- I know I have many, but this is a big one -- is that of fire destroying my house and causing me to loose my collections. The problem is, I don't collect things like figurines, I collect (hoarde, actually) information and memories. Over the last year or so, I've found myself trying to get ALL the crap I never want to lose onto the computer (and backed up on DVDs or online, of course) so that if I can only grab one thing on my way out the door, it's the computer. I probably didn't mention that that's why I scanned every photo I own in the entry I wrote about doing that, but that's why.
Anyway, besides my music, my papers from college, my old website designs, and my photos, the only other collection I've ever cared much about is my books. Some of them would be irreplaceable if destroyed because they contain messages from old babysitters or because they're old editions from my childhood. Mainly, though, I worry that I'll never be able to recreate my book collection because I won't know which books I had.
Earlier this year, I spent a lot of time searching for a service where I could record my library. I found software that would do that, but most of them were a lot more complex than I was looking for, as well as too expensive, and not very conducive to saving the list if the hard drive died. In the end, I set to work creating an Excel spreadsheet (see previous entry for more on my love of spreadsheets), but it was very time consuming because, for some reason, I felt compelled to enter in the names of the publishers, the copyright date, and every identifying detail that could ever be necessary in, for instance, a works cited list. It got to be too much very quickly and I stopped before I even hit 20 books. So I gave up. I tried to put it out of my mind and instead focused on worrying about cataloguing our DVD collection, which is pretty stupid since there's only one movie I really care about replacing. But I managed to let the book thing go. Sort of.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday when I was looking at some blogs belonging to lesbian parents, I noticed an item on one blog's sidebar that said, "Random books from _______'s library. Powered by Library Thing."
I almost died, I swear. My breathing stopped and I thought I was going to implode.
I'm not kidding, I couldn't handle the excitement. I had to bookmark the Library Thing website and set it aside until my poor little heart could take it. Tonight, when Lauren spent a few hours in the lounge at a building program, I began The Project to End All Projects. I entered in our entire library.
Now, to be fair, I didn't realize until way too late that you could enter in the ISBN and get the EXACT book, if it was available. So a lot of those are incorrect editions or printings. Also, somewhere around 10 books couldn't be found at all, and I was stupid enough to not pay attention to which ones those were. At some point I'll have to go back and put those in manually. Some of them are missing data about authors, too, so that needs fixing. And I'm sure there are a few books scattered around the apartment that I've missed. But in the end, what counts is that OUR LIBRARY IS PRESERVED FOR ALL ETERNITY!
And with tags. Oh my goodness how I love tags. Tags are the best thing ever invented on the web.
My library is online. With tags. And my amazon.com wishlist has been all organized in categories (not as good as tags, but good). I'm so worked up that I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight.
Posted to Books at 03:21 AM | Comments (4)
December 08, 2005
babies! babiesbabiesbabiesbabies!
Last night I made Lauren take me to the bookstore so I could look at
Taking Charge of Your Fertility and so I could compare The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians and The Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth (the former is wonderful; the latter sucks and was immediately removed from my amazon.com wishlist upon returning home).
No, we're not having a baby. Not now, not in the next year. Probably not even in the next two years. So much needs to happen before we can start that -- IF we decide to go the route of me being pregnant, I need to lose weight, I need to do some intense EMDR and/or hypnotherapy on needles, and we need to have a substantially higher income. In the mean time, however, it does feel time to start doing some real research. Not blog reading. Not random searches on the web. Real research.
Anyway, I was really impressed by what I was reading. So thorough. Written so I understand what's being said. And also, I was impressed with myself. I only got grossed out once, and it was during a conversation with Lauren about what I was reading rather than while reading the book itself. Major major improvement for me.
I also looked at The Baby Name Wizard, which was a lot of fun, but not as much fun as I was hoping for. It had both of the girl names Lauren and I have picked out, but I didn't like any of the suggested sibling names for them. It didn't have the boy name I like, and the boy names that Lauren and I both like and agree on are far too popular. The end. I'm sure I'll look at it more, but I think I got what I could out of it. After all, I've been reading baby name books since I was 7, so most of what was in there wasn't new. Only the sibling name suggestions were really new.
I'm really enjoying learning about this new thing. Anyone who knows me well knows that unless I'm learning about something NEW, I'm bored out of my mind. This is something new, something useful (whether we go that route someday or not), and something fun.
I'm happy.
Posted to Books & Nesting at 12:10 PM | Comments (5)
September 13, 2005
I, too, don't want to wait until death to seek the Great Perhaps
I know I've been posting a lot right now, but I really need to share. I just finished reading a wonderful book. Wonderful enough that, even though it's in hardcover, I'm going to keep. For me, that says a lot.
The book is called Looking for Alaska, by John Green, and I found it via the livejournal of a literary agent whose journal I'm stalking. She did a Q&A with the author, which prompted me to read the review on Amazon which convinced me that I MUST read this book.
It's one of those books that's terribly quotable. Every paragraph seems full of infinite wisdom, and though I only found one quotation short and self-explanatory enough to make an away message, I wish I could highlight the book to death.
It's also one of those stories where you're not sure whose story it is... I'm a sucker for books and movies where the narrator is not necessarily the main character. The beginning of this book certainly makes it seem that way, but by the end, I think it was the narrator's story after all.
Right now, too, it really spoke to me. My great struggle in the last few months has been about taking risks. I used to be an emotional risk-taker, but something in me stopped and ran for cover. As the book says toward the end, I made myself a box in the corner of the labyrinth and pretended it was home when really I was just as lost as ever. I have been wondering, lately, how to become a risk-taker again. How to become, in fact, a bigger risk-taker than I was before. Wondering why I am so focused on control. The book didn't have answers -- no good book should -- but it certainly supported my questions. That's what I look for in a book.
Most of all, it was the kind of book you can't read sitting up, because you need to be close to your pillows and blankets. Everyone should go read it.
"I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails." -Looking for Alaska
Posted to Books at 12:01 AM | Comments (2)
September 12, 2005
This appears to be a ranty day.
I live in a land with no books.
Lauren and I spent a decent amount of time at the bookstore this weekend, but unfortunately, that entailed a 40 minute drive to the shopping community mentioned in my previous post. We really, truly, couldn't find another bookstore closer to Oberlin, but at the time, I hoped that was just because we were away from a phone book and I promised myself that I'd look it up when we got home.
A few minutes ago, I did just that. I did a search by distance, and between here and that shopping area, I found 5 Christian bookstores, one comic book store, 3 Waldenbooks inside of malls, and one small bookstore that seems harmlessly generic.
Where are the books, Lorain County? WHERE?
There is a public library in Oberlin. I admit that I haven't been inside yet, but I often do searches of their catalog. I haven't yet found any of the books I've looked for there, but I do plan to wander through one day and, if nothing else, read some Baby-Sitters Club books.
I have to admit, though, that I didn't even know that places existed without bookstores anywhere in a 25 mile radius. When I was a student here, the limited reading-for-pleasure that I did came from books I bought online or while at home... Right now, I have a ton of free time on my hands and not enough money to actually purchase books. I just want to sit in a bookstore, skim some books, smell that book smell, and watch my fellow book-lovers love their books. Is that really so much to ask?
Posted to Books at 09:55 PM | Comments (2)