Cacti

On public speaking

I am in a public speaking club at school and I really like it a lot.  Three people give prepared speeches every week, three people evaluate their speeches, and there are also extemporaneous speeches where people are put on the spot with random questions that they have to answer.  I really enjoyed giving my prepared speech, but the extemporaneous speeches can be terrible.  Tonight, the question I had to answer was something like, “So we’ve had bird flu and swine flu … what will be the next big flu outbreak?”  and I just started rambling on about … I don’t even know what.  Words were coming out of my mouth, but I’m not entirely sure what they were and I KNOW they didn’t make any sense.

However, that said, it’s good practice because sometimes in life, you really DO have to talk out of your ass and it’s nice to be in an environment where you can get comfortable doing that.  Furthermore, it’s also sort of helpful because it helps people get over their embarassment over saying stupid things.  I mean, I know whatever I said tonight was stupid, but it also does not matter that much.  In my younger days, I would probably lose sleep over saying something stupid in front of a crowd of people, but now I know that it’s really not worth stressing over so much.  There are more important things to lose sleep over.

I also really like it because it helps you learn more about people.  People share stories that are funny and interesting and I love hearing about other peoples’ lives and the paths that brought them to the places they are today.

Food Find of the Day:  Edy’s Slow-Churned Pumpkin Ice Cream.  Amazing.

 

Hey! I’ve been there!

As shallow as this is, one thing I love about LA is frequently seeing places I’ve been on TV and in the movies.  Like on 90210 last night, we saw The Edison, which is  a bar inside LA’s first power plant.  It has an amazing atmosphere, amazing drinks, and literally makes you feel like you are on a night out in the 1920s.  There are actually women wandering about wearing flapper attire.  I hear it is more douchebag-heavy on a Saturday night, but I’ve been twice (on a Wednesday and a Friday) and both experiences were delightful.

Also, 90210 featured Pink’s Hot Dogs, the landmark hot dog stand that has been around since the Great Depression.  Pink’s is known for their hot dogs named after celebrities.  I have not been there since college, but  I remember thinking that the hot dog itself was not worth the line I stood in to get it.  That often seems to be the case with landmarks, but I think it is a place that Angelenos and LA visitors should hit at least once.

But 90210 … everyone knows that you can’t get that close to the Hollywood sign!  It is actually against the law.  I actually hiked Mt. Hollywood – by myself – a few weeks ago when I was feeling quite overcaffeinated.  I was really overcaffeinated, people.  I actually scaled this incredibly steep hill and practically killed myself.  Luckily, this hike is popular so my carcass  would have been found before mountain lions had finished eating me.  Anyway, there is a great view of Mt. Lee from this hike, which (I think) may be as close as one can get to the Hollywood sign.

This is one of my favorite quites about LA, from LA Story:

“Roland thinks LA is a place for the brain-dead. He says, if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert. But I think – I don’t know, it’s not what I expected. It’s a place where they’ve taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. I’ve seen a lot of LA and I think it’s also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is all right.”

New Life Rule

No more french fries after 11 PM.  At least on a week night.

Find someone special?

There is this commercial for Match.com that is in black and white where this guy is putting on a fedora and he says, “I guess I’m sort of an all-American boy when it comes to food.  I love cheeseburgers!”  And then he does this really odd little dance where he starts clapping and yelling, “Woo!” The voice-over tells us, “Find someone special in 6 months.  Guaranteed.”  And then we see our fedora-wearing friend biting into a Hostess cupcake and commenting, “This is good.”

Wow.

I have a hard time believing that this commercial is increasing sign-ups for Match.com amongst women because if this guy is the “someone special”  we can expect to find there, NO THANK YOU. (It might be working with single men who are thinking, “Well, hey, I’m much cooler than THAT guy…”)

First of all, he’s wearing a fedora.  Strike one.  Second of all, his “interesting personal fact” that he is sharing with potential dates is that he likes cheeseburgers.  Which is not interesting or unique or anything.  Who DOESN’T love cheeseburgers?  (God, he doesn’t even say he loves cheeseburgers, which is at least slightly more impassioned than “I like cheeseburgers.”)

Since he has a fedora on, I sort of think that he’s a pretentious hipster and that his circle of friends are all on a raw food diet or something and that they think that it’s wonderfully quirky and down with the common folk that he likes cheeseburgers.

The little dance he performs, I guess, inspired by cheeseburgers, is actually just embarrassing, especially when he starts “woo”-ing.  He seems like the type of guy who thinks he’s just an awesome dancer and will start dancing really conspicuously at bars or parties wearing his stupid fedora  when no one else is dancing, waiting for people to approach him and compliment him on his slick moves, at which point he will feign modesty.  I think I hate him.

And we leave him as he is stuffing his face with a Hostess cupcake.  Uhh, how dreamy…?

I mean, seriously, Match.com?  Is this the best you’ve got?

“You all look…”

Since it is NaBloPoMo, I am going to write a blog post every day this month.

Last night was, obviously, Halloween.  And I had a lovely Halloween weekend this year, but right now, I am exhausted.  I spent most of the day intermittently doing Economics homework, getting bored of Economics homework and watching TV instead, and recommitting myself to Economics homework.  When I was younger and my brain cells had not started dying yet, I was very capable of doing homework while watching TV.  This is not really the case anymore.  Or, rather, I am capable of doing homework while watching TV, but it takes about five hours longer than it should.

But back to Halloween.  One difference between a Massachusetts Halloween and a Los Angeles Halloween is that there is a greater emphasis on very polished-looking, store bought costumes here that are often “Sexy Whatever.” I feel like I didn’t see as much “Sexy Whatever” in Boston because  it’s very cold in Boston at around this time of year and people tend to be more interested in wearing clever costumes than sexy ones.  (This isn’t a hard and fast rule.  Just something I’ve noticed.)

So, I dressed as a Twilight fan this year, inspired by a woman I saw at Disneyland back in February who was wearing sweatpants that said “Twilight” on the ass.  In addition to my Edward Cullen tee-shirt, pins, bracelets and body glitter (to sparkle like Edward!), I wore a very short leather skirt that is much shorter than the type of skirt I normally wear.  I had no illusions about competing with the sexy fairies, nurses, pirates and whatnot out and about on a Halloween night – that’s not really my thing.  But hey, it’s Halloween, and if I can’t wear a short leather skirt on Halloween, when can I wear one? Certainly not to school.  Anyway, I thought that I looked about as cool as someone wearing a Twilight tee-shirt could look.

AND YET, despite my best attempts to look cool, guess what a random (very intoxicated) party guest told my friends and me while we were standing around sipping our cocktails on a Santa Monica roofdeck?  “You all look SMART.”

Which is clearly code for “You look like NERDS!”  This is the first impression we collectively give. Because EVEN IN COSTUMES, we will never stand out as the cool people at a party, but the people who likely spend lots of time at libraries.

 

 

The Omnivore’s Hundred

A British food blogger came up with this list of 100 things that he feels that every omnivore should try in his or her life, and since I love food, I thought it was a fun game…

All of the items I have eaten are bolded with the items I would not consider eating italicized.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos Rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (No, but I’d be interested in trying it)
6. Black pudding (I tried this in England and would probably never eat it again.)
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp (Don’t like it.)
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J Sandwich
14. Aloo Gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (I had to look this up, and found that it is a cheese from France, which means I have probably tried it?  But can’t recall.)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes (No, but this sounds cool.)
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese (No, thank you!)
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper. (No, but I will take this as a challenge.)
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna caude
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea (again in England – yum!)
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (I would try them if pressed, but only cooked.)
43. Phaal (I had to look this up, and since I have eaten a lot of British Indian food, it seems like something I have probably eaten, but I will not count it.  I love hot curries, so am intrigued.)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/€80/$120 or more
46. Fugu (No.)
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly Pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (I don’t know what this is.)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess fruit pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky (love!)
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant (Do Restaurant Week menus count?)
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa (I had to look this up, and it sounds amazing.)
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain Coffee
100. Snake

69% – Not bad, but I have some eating to do.

Grossest Thing I’ve Heard on TV Tonight

From “Accidentally On Purpose,” I give you, “I have happy feelings in my downstairs area.”  Kill me.  CBS, please, I implore you, put “The Big Bang Theory” back on at 8:30 PM and relieve me of this misery.

Top 20 Joss Whedon TV Episodes

Hi. I’ve been really busy with school, socializing, running a 5K, new fall TV, and work, but things are humming along well.

I have seen a few sites feature lists of  the top episodes of Joss Whedon’s TV shows (EW and TWOP did this, anyway).  I am a big Joss Whedon fan, and was sort of eye-rolly about some of their choices, so I was compelled to compile a list of my own.  In fact, some of the other lists I saw online included my LEAST favorite episodes like “Our Mrs. Reynolds” (yes, Christina Hendricks is famous now but that doesn’t make this episde good), “The Body” (sorry, I know people love this one, but I thought it was overwrought), “A Hole in the World” (I mean … no.  “Not this girl.  Not this day.”  No.)

Some of these episodes are a little dodgy in my mind. The “Angel” episodes are fresher, actually, because I’ve been rewatching that series recently.  But I wanted to include all episodes that struck me as really memorable, even if I may be a little sketchy about the events therein or why I thought they were brilliant.

The Essential Buffy

-Innocence: Angel loses his soul.  For the first time.

-Passion: Angel kills Jenny Calendar. (Poor Giles.)  This episode is so great.

-Becoming I/II: Buffy stakes Angelus as he is re-souled.  Xander does something very ethically sketchy.

-Graduation Day I/II: I love the moment with the gang standing around the ruins of their destroyed high school.  This is my favorite “arc” episode of Buffy.

-Hush: Everyone loses the power speech and the episode plays out like a silent movie.  It’s amazingly constructed with truly scary villains.  It’s a complete delight.

-Fool for Love: Spike’s history of killing Slayers.  I remember this and “Darla” aired back-to-back and I was just blown away by the two hour experience.

-Once More with Feeling: The musical episode.  This could have been stupid, but is wonderful.

The Essential Angel

-To Shanshu in LA: This episode really cements our gang, Wolfram & Hart as a series Big Bad, and gives Angel something to work towards.

-Darla: “Fool for Love’s” companion piece.  All of the Darla/Angel/Drusilla/Spike flashbacks are just so epic.  I can even forgive David B’s Irish accent.

-Reunion:  Angel, at his most morally ambiguous, locks Dru and Darla in a wine cellar full of lawyers.  I remember at the time being sad, thinking we’d never see Lindsey and Lilah again. But I was thankfully wrong.

-Loyalty/Sleep Tight/Forgiving: Fantastic.  Holtz was one of my favorite villains. And Wesley makes a terrible decision, thinking he’s doing the right thing, cementing his descent into being more Angel-y than Angel. And the hamburger oracle! I probably think this is the high point of the entire series and none of the other lists I’ve read online ignored this arc.

-Deep Down: Probably includes more times I’ve shrieked in surprise watching TV than any other episode of anything ever.

Note: I had, like, maybe the biggest crush on Wesley as I’ve had on any TV character other than Fox Mulder.  I always had his picture as my computer’s desktop background in college because that’s how I roll. (It should be pointed out that this was a time before students brought their laptops to class, so my dorky lameness was kept hidden from society at large.)  I’d sit around like, “Why doesn’t anyone appreciate Wesley’s awesome DEMON LINGUISTICS SKILLS?  He is SO underappreciated.”  Anyhoo, so when Wesley went all dark and disturbed and started banging Lilah and keeping people in cages in his closet, I was SO EXCITED.  I sort of miss having that sort of joy over events occurring on a television show.

-Awakening: Angel experiences a totally constructed day of perfect happiness and loses his soul.  They totally faked me out the first time I watched this.

-You’re Welcome: A very well-done and bittersweet send-off for Cordelia.  I love this episode even more in retrospect.  It’s touching without being overwrought.

-Smile Time: “You’re a wee little puppet man!”

The Essential Firefly

-Jaynestown: Jayne is a folk hero.

-Out of Gas: This, I think, is my favorite episode of “Firefly.”  I just love the flashbacks of Mal’s first meeting with everyone.

-Ariel: The crew sneaks into an Alliance hospital so that Simon may do an exam on River.  This competes with “Out of Gas” for my favorite episode.  It is very suspenseful and well-done.

-War Stories: Great moments between Wash and Mal; it makes me sad that we didn’t spend more time with all of these characters.  There were so many interesting combinations and places to take them.

Dr. Horrible’s Singalong Blog:  Not TV, but I love it too much not to include it.

Ipurposely included no episodes of “Dollhouse,” because while I do enjoy it (and “Epitaph One” showed a lot of promise), it’s not really there yet.

First Days

I went to Orientation for my graduate program this weekend. It was both inspiring and sort of socially awkward, as these types of things are wont to be. (Sometimes, when making chit-chat with strangers, I go overboard and start launching into full-blown stand-up comedy routines, only made worse if I am getting a good response. If people are laughing at my jokes, it may actually make me funnier, but also less likely to shut up.)

Orientations and First Days are interesting; I am always hyper-aware of the fact that I will likely come to know most of the people I am meeting for the first time very well and am wondering in advance how my first impressions will hold up. I almost feel like I am living these First Days in a flashback from Future Caroline, anticipating how I will look back on the day in a year or two. Perhaps next August, I will be chatting with someone I met this weekend, saying, “Hey, remember when we met at Orientation? Wasn’t my hair like TOTALLY lopsided that day?” (It was. You should see my student ID.)

I can remember quite clearly my emotions and thoughts on other important First Days in my life – my first day at my undergraduate institution, my first day in Paris during my study abroad program, my first day at grad school in London, my first day at my job in Boston – as I experienced them at the time. (I don’t so much remember the first days of jobs I remember less fondly quite as clearly, which I suppose makes sense.) The emotions are similar for each First Day: the nervousness and curiosity about other people and wanting to make a good impression.

But right now, I am mostly filled with anticipation: Where will I be after I finish this program? What will I have learned? What people did I meet already that might potentially become important to me? I am excited to find out.