Category — General

What could possibly break my blogging hiatus? Did I stop writing other stuff? Am I a blog-addict again? Nah. Not yet. I just wanted to share what Christmas looks like around here. Plus, I know you’ve been missing my famous way-too-many-pics posts more than anything else.

So Merry Christmas FtR friends! (Sorry, no gift receipts.)

Last year at night (Well, kinda, this is really 2 years ago.):

This year at night (via iPhone):

This year during the day (via Nikon):

Last year’s star:

This year’s star:

Last year ornament close-up:

This year ornament close-up:

I know you’re wondering, “Why?” by this point. I have pictures for that too!

Take Christmas & subtract last year’s wonder-stealing “No-No, Please” . . .

. . . add this year’s, “It’s all yours!” . . .

. . . and you get:

See what I mean?

Who wants “No” to be a Christmas Motto, anyway? So, if you drop by this holiday season, don’t expect anything fancy, but bring your glitter and your glue stick. If you’re lucky, I might fill your sippy with some lukewarm hot chocolate and let you have a cookie without sitting in your chair. By the time you get here, we should have some presents wrapped in bright, foil paper with curly ribbons and fur-lined santa bows, too.

And surely I don’t have to tell you the soundtrack for decorating for “A Toddler Style Christmas” was, of course, A Charlie Brown Christmas.

(P.S. I tried to shoot some “formal” pics of Caelyn with the tree. Take the jump to see how it went.)

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I’m sure all you’ve done since I’ve been gone is pray that I’d return, and that’s sweet and all, but I’m still doing what I said I was doing before at a decent pace, so this is merely a brief interruption to my sabbatical, not an end.

(I know I’m pushing it. If I stay away too much longer, the few Record fans left will give up hope and I’ll have to start all over. Just give me a little more time, please. Would it help if I told you that I have missed you?)

I’m just dropping in to share a couple gems I found in a box in the top of my closet today while I was looking at old photographs instead of packing for our trip to Abilene. It’s not really my fault I got sidetracked. Chris is the one who announced that the software update that would make our scanner work with our computer again had finally come out. How I could think about anything else with all that scanning I’ve had backing up?

Anyway, right now, I’m really just focusing on scanning in pics from undergrad. (I don’t know what I’ll do with them. Maybe I’ll put a few on Facebook or something.) But I came across one from way before undergrad and couldn’t resist pairing it up with it’s partner from HSU. Enjoy.

Me (and most of Papa Joe) at our house in New Jersey, Christmas 1985.

Me (and Janice, Darrah, and Kelly) dressed like 1985 outside The Black-Eyed Pea before some costume function at HSU, Fall 1999.

It’s too bad you can’t see the back of my hair. It was pretty incredible. If only I’d been born 10 years earlier. (Incidentally, some of my Basic Writing students thought perhaps I went to Senior Prom in 1987.) When C.C. saw this picture, he didn’t even notice our clothes. He just gave me this disapproving look and said, “Gee, Katy, you’ve really started wearing a lot of make-up since you went to college.”

Break over.

In case you’re worried about me and/or the state of FtR, I figured I better tell you a few things:

1. I’m alive and well.

2. I’ve been doing stuff, namely writing and reading.

I know, I know. It seems like I’ve been doing the opposite, and I guess, in a way, I have been. I haven’t been blogging. I’ve barely been Twittering. And, though I’ve made a few quick runs across the Internet, I’ve been letting my feeds pile up till they reach the triple digits and the only sensible thing to do is hit “Mark All Read.”

But I have been writing and reading. I’ve actually been behaving like a writer — writing, sharing, critiquing, reading other good writing, revising, talking to myself, staying up late, and other assorted stereotypes you surely already know. And I’m probably going to be doing it for a while.

That’s not to say FtR is dead or that I don’t have anything to blog about. . .

One of the things I read is The Mysterious Benedict Society, which Lex recommended — I’d link to where he wrote about it, but in case you haven’t noticed, that’s not an option — and it’s incredible. Caelyn’s been doing some funny stuff like whispering, “Gosh,” and some scary/gross stuff like choking at Tin Star and semi-puking on me. If Chris was writing this, he’d add an extra backslash and “hilarious” because he gets a big kick out of my involuntary responses to things like throwing and/or hocking-up. Chris has been doing some amusing stuff too, like deciding we should bake pumpkin bread, checking the cabinet over the stove for ingredients while I was in the shower, and then clearing out the whole thing in utter disbelief of his wife’s ability to make such a mess, much less create culinary masterpieces in it. I’ve been watching some awesome tween television, although not as much with all the writing and reading. The Office premiered, too, and I’ve been listening to some good music. Chris and I don’t have any more weight to lose, so we’ve been checking out local burger joints. I’ve almost decided my tooth hurts bad enough to go to the dentist and that I can’t take the noise in my ear anymore — it’s only been 3 years. Oh, yeah, and we watched my father-in-law go up in a hot air balloon. You can see all about it on Flickr.)

. . . But, you know, I started this blog to try to get back into my own voice.

I feel like I’ve told you this before, but I can’t remember. Before Caelyn came along, I was an editor/writer for a ministry in North Dallas. Essentially, that involved helping other people develop their distinct voices (which is something I really like doing) and writing gobs of stuff in a voice that’s the total opposite of mine (which is something I don’t like doing) and then letting someone else put their name on it (which isn’t a complaint; I wouldn’t want my name on it.). I did some more formal ghostwriting and stuff too, even though my artistic sensibilities consider that a betrayal. Anyway, writing like someone else 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week can wreak havoc on your own voice. I probably should’ve been writing my own stuff that whole time, but what can I say? I was pregnant.

But the point is, I think I’m starting to get it back (or at least I’m working on it in a more formal way). FtR has helped me with that, but it’s also kind of caused me to develop My Voice, Blogging Division. That’s a division that I want to call on sometimes, particularly when I work on reviews or humorous stuff. But, although I have a lot of fun doing those, they’re just not the majority of what I write.

Of course, I know FtR has developed other purposes, important ones that I’m pretty fond of, so I’m not saying it’s over. But I am saying that I’ll be focusing my energy somewhere else for a while. (Before you suggest it, I’m not posting poems/short stories/whatever on here, no matter how nice you promise to be. The biggest reasons are personal, but there are some professional ones too.)

So. There you go. Just because we’re on a break doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.

With the return of NBC to iTunes and the dawn of HD episodes, we’ve been re-watching the last season of The Office. I’d almost forgotten how funny it is. Not the show in general, just last season, because what’s fresh on my memory are the episodes after the strike. I may be in the minority, but, I think that while those episodes were good, something was just off. I didn’t feel like we were back in sync until “Did I Stutter?” where Stanley and Michael come head-to-head.

But it really is a funny season. And it brought us some major relational shifts: Dwight & Angela broken up, Michael & Jan living together, Jim & Pam dating. I care about each of those, and I know getting involved in PB&J is the cool thing to do, so I hesitate to even mention them, but it’s hard not to when I see the way Jim looks at Pam in those first few episodes.

John Krasinski nails it! I’m not sure there’s a girl in all of America whose heart doesn’t melt when he even just thinks about Pam. Last night that look got the best of me:

Me: “I’m sure Jim & Pam will end up together, even if they break up, because this is TV and it would be cruel for the writers to do that to the fans, but do you think they’d end up together in real life?”

Chris: “Of course they’re going to end up together. You can’t build that much anticipation around two characters and not put them together.”

Me: “Yeah, but I mean in real life. Would they end up together or do you think they’re too good together or something? Too much alike? You think they’d have this great relationship until a bit of doubt crept in and ruined it or do you think it’d be smooth sailing? And if they didn’t end up together, you think they’d be able to be happy?”

Chris: “Jim & Pam in real life?”

Me: “Yeah.”

Chris: “In real life, Jim & Pam aren’t real.”

Don’t worry. I know Jim & Pam aren’t real. But I do think they represent real humanity. And I don’t know if they’ll end up together on TV or not. The Office takes some close looks at some hard human issues. That’s part of what I like about it, but I doubt they’d end in such a heartbreaking spot. I don’t know if those two would end up together in real life either, but I figure there’s a higher chance that they wouldn’t in that scenario than on the airwaves.

Nothing profound came out this conversation, just that Chris doesn’t think about TV in terms of real life and he couldn’t think of a reason why those two made-for-each-others wouldn’t get together and stay together. And I, obviously, get caught up in the reality of TV all the time and wouldn’t doubt for a second that they might not end up together just because that’s the way it happens.

With that melancholic mood in place, we settled in to watch the last two S1 episodes of Mad Men, the show we’re currently watching at night. Chris picks the nighttime show — we just finished S4 of Alias and the most recent season of The Closer. He picked Mad Men too, probably because his design buddies love it, but it’s not his usual fare. It’s a quiet drama, all relationship, the opposite of what he likes. But he says he’ll come back for the second season, which is good because I’m at least mildly interested in finding out what happens to these people.

But that’s not the point. The point is the season finale wrapped and I went to sleep with this bit on “nostalgia” curled up beside me:

In case you can’t tell, Don’s an ad man, making a pitch for a slide projector. He’s a complex man who’s taken his wife for granted and run away from his past. (The guy who leaves the room crying is in the doghouse with his wife.) Don’s pitch sounds like a pitch, but I still really like what he says about nostalgia.

Then this morning I came across this story about these two young people who really are perfect for each other and know it instantly, but when they start to doubt that happiness should so be easy, they decide to test their rightness for each other by breaking up and waiting to see if life brings them back together. Years later, they do meet again, but by that time life has taken their memories and they walk past each other forever, not realizing that every other love will never be as perfect.

It’s a well-written story, and you know what? It’s what I said could happen to Jim and Pam and got scoffed at for just last night!

Just to drive this weekend’s nostalgia theme all the way home, I also read an article on eMusic where this musician lists her favorite albums. She starts the description of one with, “You know how people who love music are always talking about how an album takes them back?” That got me thinking, because while I figure she’s probably right, I’d never imagined that that’s not true for everyone. I mean, I have albums I listen to for the mere sake of going back, but that also happens unintentionally. And with all the sensory ties to memory, it’s hard to believe music wouldn’t do that even for people who aren’t “music lovers.”

Anyway, I planned on connecting all these incidents into some cohesive thoughts on the nature of nostalgia, memory, media (TV, literature, music), and the senses. (I was gonna tie The Office into memory, maybe via personality, but really, I just wanted to talk about The Office, as if you can’t tell from Twitter.) And I was going to revise each of those points down, but Caelyn’s crying, so I guess I’m not. I’m sure I’ll be getting nostalgic later this weekend anyway, so maybe I’ll have some new thoughts that’ll make a nice tie-together post on Monday.

In the meantime, this is what you get.

But I will try to sneak away for comment responding sometime this weekend! (Thanks for all yours!) And, I’m not sure if it was a request or a threat, but here ya go, JSmo! If you make your first post something about the psychology of memory, I might not even have to finish this series.

Me, throwing another shirt on the bed: “Gaaaah!”

Chris: “What was wrong with what you had on the first time?”

Me: “Those stripes just don’t work with low-rise jeans.”

Chris: “I thought you looked great.”

Me, pulling another shirt off its hanger: “Yeah, yeah. . . . SERIOUSLY! This is ridiculous!”

Chris: “What’s wrong with that one? T-shirt and jeans?”

Me: “There are two kinds of t-shirt and jeans when it comes to women. One says, ‘Sexy and effortless.’ The other says, ‘Asexual slob.’ This right here says, ‘Welcome back to the Maury Povich show, today’s topic: Surprise! You’re married to a hermaphrodite.’”

I’ve been doing a lot of shopping lately. Kinda. I’ve been looking at a lot of clothes and shoes, trying to decide how to make the best use of my cash. Basically, I need an entire new wardrobe — right down to the skivvies. So far I’ve purchased two pairs of jeans, a pair of black pants, 2 pairs of shoes, a stripped button-down, a belt, a sweater, and two semi-dress shirts. I’ve got a black skirt from another life and a few size 10 shoes from my old 9 1/2 or 10 days. I’ve got some things that I’m hoping to get taken in. Then I’ve got t-shirts that are too big and a stack of tanks that fit perfectly, but I’ve only got 2 layering tanks, which means after 2 days I can either re-wear a layering one and be smelly or let my bra straps hang out and be trashy. (Or do laundry, but c’mon.)

I know lots of people have less. And it’s not a big deal, because I don’t get out all that much. But still. It gets to me sometimes.

The shopping gets me worked up sometimes too. I don’t mind shopping. But, really, I’m in a curious stage, walking that line between 21 and 39, frumpy mom and MILF Island. Plus, I’ve got to worry about being original/not getting boxed into my Definitive Year of Style*, while still not looking like I’m trying too hard to stay hip.

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