My 34 year old sister and my birthday present

A couple of days ago a box arrived from my sister who lives in Portland, Oregon. Her gifts to me have been getting increasingly weird (weird: huh?, not weird: Cool!) for the past few years. I think she out did herself this year. I opened the box only to be face to face with a Barbie doll. That's right, a Barbie doll.
Now, I have quite frequently bought toys for adult friends when the toys were 1) just plain really cool (like an RC Cobra, as in snake, with flashing red eyes from Fisher price, if you get 2 you can race them!) or 2) somehow spoke of the person's personality (a nerf dart gun for one of my managers at Bordes so she could shoot co-workers when they did something dumb at the register). I think my sister was trying to do one or both of these things, but it falls a bit flat since I HATE BARBIES.
I never understood the fascination with Barbie dolls. As a little girl I was always like "You can take their clothes off and put on new ones? What else do they do? Oh, nothing. Uh, no, thank you." I liked my dolls to actually DO something. My favorite toys included Transformers (still have an original Soundwave), G.I. Joes (only the females), Golden Girls (no, not the TV show about the old people, they were warrior women complete with WEAPONS), Sectaurs (very obscure), Jem dolls (I preferred the Misfits, thank you), and My Little Ponies (unicorns, of course).
To a certain extent I can see her amusement about it. It's a wizard (Mattel cashing in on the Harry Potter phenomenon) Barbie named Christie. Ok, kind of amusing. I did go through a pagan stage in my teenage years, but I got better. And Christie is almost like Chrissy, but I still don't answer to it. It's more of one of those things you point to in a store and laugh, not buy and send cross country. I am being bothered by how much she doesn't know me anymore, or by how much she is not adjusting her view of me. We used to be ridiculously close. Several years ago she got me a Jack Skellington mug (I still use it). A few years after that she bought me an X-tra large 'I Leave Bite Marks' t-shirt (XL?! and 'I Leave Bite Marks' is a little creepy coming from one's sister). This year it's a "Pagan" Barbie (yes, that's what she called it in her card to me).

An aside:
Jermy bought me two stuffed dragons from Manhatten Toys for my birthday. I pointed them out in the store and snuggled them before I put them back. He also knows that I've been heartbroken because I came to the realization this summer that sometime in the last few moves I lost my pewter dragon collection that I started when I was like 7 or 8. Included in that collection were atleat 2 dragons from my grandfather that I will never be able to replace. It's been like loosing a chuck of my childhood.

Dragons from Jeremy made sense. A Barbie from my sister just made me go Why?

They Might Be Giants, they might be right

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6355259/

Cooking Failure

So, I've been spending the past year or so learning to cook more interesting things. Previously, I had just been concentrating on baked goods, cookies, cakes, breads, and most recently brownies. I've gotten quite good at the baking thing. Most of the time, if something doesn't come out right (like about a month ago I baked the Worst Brownies Ever, despite following an award winning recipe. Yes, it was the recipe's fault, not mine) I can figure out exactly where it went wrong and fix it in the next trial recipe or two. I have no idea what I did yesterday.

I set out to make baked beans, the kind you eat with good barbeque stuff. I like them, and I figured they couldn't really be that complicated. So, I looked at a bunch of different recipes to see what the basic ingredients, cooking times, and methods were. I based a recipe on a combination of several. Since I didn't have a cast iron dutch oven, I decided to use my crock pot (yes, I have a crock pot, it makes REALLY good stews and beef stroganoff with hardly any effort). I checked again with several recipes, and crock pot "baked" beans were supposedly utterly feasible.

Yesterday before work, I set said dried beans to soak, by the time I would get home it would have been 8 hours, plenty of time for soaking dried beans. I prepared the beans in the crock pot whille we cooked dinner. Since the cooking time on them was 8-10 hours I figured cooking them over night would be best. Since it was my first trial, I didn't want any sort of meal revolving around them, and baked beans for breakfast didn't sound too ridiculous.

So at six this morning I got up to check on what should have been a pot of well cooked beans. They weren't. It didn't look like thay had taken in ANY more moisture, let alone turn into a pot of delicious baked beans. I did remember around 5 that I had forgotten mustard, but that shouldn't have affected the cooking, just the flavor. The beans were still hard and I have no idea what I did wrong. I haven't a clue where to begin to "fix" this recipe for another trial.

I'm a little sad.

How I Paid For College take two: An Epiphany

Ok, actually having to write this down in some sort of coherant method got me thinking about this. It's certainly not the book's content that's bugging me, though, for good or bad, I have take it into consideration when deciding whenther it should go in the Young Adult or Adult section. Having just finished Doing It before starting How I Paid for College I can say that the HIPFC is rather tame in comparison (so far, still about 80 pages from the end, I have little desire to force myself to read it). However, Doing It was amazing. It was funny, it was poinant, it was so on target that I had a hard time believing it was written by an adult, not some 16 year old that this all happened to last year. There are so many elements in it that so many people who choose to remember what those years were like can relate to. On the other hand, how HIPFC was written has forced it to be only relavant to a small clique of folks. And yes yes yes you can argue that relevance is subjective and who the hell is fantasy relavent to? But if your characters are so esoteric why should your readers care about them? If I can care about a British kid who's a bit of a jerk and all he seems to care about is loosing his virginity, why can't I care about a bisexual kid from New Jersey who all he wants to do is escape to a college of the Arts? [For those of you who don't know, I went to Art school, and spent a great deal of effort to get there. My art teacher actually told me I wasn't good enough to get in. I showed her! Now I work in a Library.] It just seems wrong to me, to absoloutely not care about a character who I actually have something in common with, but just can't stand because of how his story is told.
Jeremy and I quote movies we like to each other constantly, but I would not choose to write a story based on either of our youths using those quotes. No one else would get it. And I understand that.
oodilolly oodilolly, golly what a day

How I Paid For College

So this is the book I keep talking about. Full title and author: How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater by Marc Acito. Mind you I STILL haven't finished it, so many of these thoughts are impressions while reading. To catch everyone up these are what I've said to Leila about it already:

• Ok, So, I read a few more pages yesterday....and it took quite the unexpected turn. I don't know if I should tell you what happened, because I think it should be unexpected (well, there were hints, but I never expected a YA book to go THERE), and I don't want to color your reading of it. But, this new plot twist has me going, "OK, so it has annoying characters, it has references to 20 year old culture, it has musical/drama in jokes, and NOW it has a (it may have more, I haven't gotten that far) scene that will have numerous parents running for their torches. What exactly does it have to offer the YA community?" So, yeah, I need a few more opinions on this one, and some discussion. I am the LAST person who would censor this scene, but I also am aware of what tweaks all those crazy book censoring folks out.
• The rant that's brewing about this book is just getting too big. I'm tempted to read Shadowmancer to see which one wins the "Worst Book I Have Ever Read" contest.
  My current recommendation is keep it in Adult (actually my current recommendation is send it the fuck back to B&T and get our money back and spend the $13 - after discount- on someting worth while like Paris Hilton's memoirs. Atleast folks will WANT to read that crap.)

Ok, I may be being unfair about this book because I was expecting a YA book. It's about a boy in his senior year of high school (and the summer before) who wants to go to Juliard to be and ACTOR. His dad being a business guy, thinks this is useless and tells boy that he won't pay for something so frivolous. Boy (Edward for those who care) needs to figure out how he's going to get into said college and, supposed, hilarity ensues.
Why would I think this wasn't a YA book? It has all the elements that generally make up a good YA book: high school setting, going against parental unit, finding oneself, discovering one's sexuality, a struggle to get into college.
Ok so we put it in the adult section. But I have to ask, how many adults would care about this book? It doesn't relate to them, it about high school kids. Your average adult (who doesn't normally read YA lit) why would they care about a 17 y/o struggling to go college against dad's wishes. They wouldn't. But unfortuneatly the humor revolves around culture that's 20 years old.

"that I am to lead the Play People Parade like the Pied Piper or the Dr Pepper guy."

The Dr Pepper guy? I BARELY remember those commercials.
Then there are the DOZENS of references to plays, musicals, movies that the humor revolves around that if you don't know what he's talking about makes you feel like you are sitting in a group of folks who have all their own in-jokes that you were never a part of.

"I imagine us growing up and getting married (to women, I mean) but still carrying on annual clandestine trysts in the manner of Same Time, Next Year."

"It's not long before the place [his house after a party gets going] looks like Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights."

and you guys can use your imagination to figure out what this next scene has to do with.

"Of course Doug is reluctant, but eventually I wear down his resistance by telling him he doesn't have to touch me and if he just closes his eyes, well, a mouth's a mouth, right? I even go so far as to sing a little of Aldonza the whore's song from Man of La Mancha"

These references are not few and far between. They happen every 2-5 pages.
There are also atleast 3 times where the author (posing as Edward as this book is told in the first person) describes what the movie of his life would be like.

"When they make the movie of my life, this trip will definately have to be another of those montage sequences filled with madcap adolescent high jinks"

Quite honestly I feel this comes off as pretentious not humorous.
I have to stop at this point. I may say more in another blog when I actually finish this book. but to sum up:

• Is this book engaging enough to finish? No, but I've come this far I might as well finish it.
• Do I care about the characters? No, I think they're all pretentious assholes.
• Does it speak to its intended audience? I have no idea who its intended audience is. That's one of the problems with this book. It seems like it was written for the author's 3 friends. Or maybe just so the author could hear himself talk.
  
• It is original? Not particularly. I've read other books that deal with similiar issues and handle them better, probably because they choose an audience.

Spell check's not working in my browser, so deal.

It's all Leila's Fault

So I've given into peer pressure again, just like when I joined Friendster. Leila's been enjoying my rants that I've been sending her through email so much that she thinks everyone else should get to read them. So, here I am. I can only assume that this blog will take on a format similair to Leila's in that I will be talking about what books I'm reading and what I think about them. In saying that let me get a few things clear. I in no way shape or form pressume to know or understand what good writing is. I am not nor was I ever an English major. I don't read to improve my intelligence and I don't read books because they're "classics". As a matter of fact if you tell me a book is a classic I'm more likely not to read it. I'm just like that. I read because I'm addicted to it. Plain and simple. I get uncomforatable if I have nothing to read. I also read because I enjoy it, and I always have. So what am I looking at when I say a book is good or not? Well, here are a few example of things I consider when I actually have to explain my reasoning to others out side my head:

• Was the story engaging? Did it pull me in enough to be bothered reading it instead of the 10 other books on my need to read list?
• Do I care about the characters? Do I want them to succeed in their endevors or do I just wished they'd die and stop whining?
• Do I think this book speaks to/has meaning to its intended audience? This is used mostly when I'm critiquing juvenile and young adult literature.
• It is original? Many things aren't completely original these days and I understand that. But is this story original enough that I'm not screaming at the book when I read it "For the love of God, do ALL elves have to be whiny dwarf haters?" Yes, I yell at books when I read them, leave me alone.

These are all I can think of at the moment, but I'm pretty sure they're most most common ones.
The only thing else I can say is everyone prepare yourselves and remember It's All Leila's Fault.