Valentune

Jared is in production! This is good, but I don't see him as much as I'd like to once pre-pro starts. However, he does love me enough to wine and dine me, minus the wine. We went to Sundance Foundry Grill to celebrate our love. For food. Milo was mesmerized by the fire, and the yuppies.

Milo contemplating the subtleties of the amuse-bouche. And . . . he likes it!

Apres-lunch, we walked around bumping into rich skiers, looking at pictures of celebrities before they were famous, and admiring matte gold jewelry I can't afford.

Jared is STILL doing production work, Milo is sleeping in some weird position, leaving me to my devices. SOO I just made my gift to you, dear friend/acquaintance/parole officer -- a VALENTUNE!

Here's a playlist just for you, cause we like, like each other and stuff.

>VALENTUNE

Cuddle up with your spouse, significant other, or Nora Ephron and enjoy yourself. But not too much. This is a Thursday night after all.

The Girl Crush

Happy Valentine's Day (this week). In honor of this most venerated holiday, I'd like to talk about a different kind of love. The Girl Crush.

Though unable to date the phrase back to its first use, I think I first heard it floating around female lexicons somewhere around the year 2000, probably, knowing the crowds I ran in, in reference to the arthouse crossover Amelie.

The titular character was disgustingly adorable - a twee brunette with large brown eyes and a heart of gold. She talked to her bedroom decor, played elaborate puzzles with a garden gnome and dressed not unlike the Lone Ranger all in her twisty-turvy plot to find love. And France be damned if it didn't work. Men and women the world over were immediately and severely enamored with Audrey Tautou.

Amelie Poulain, about to eat the undeniably twee dessert, creme brulee.

Today, the phenomenon of the girl crush is alive and swinging. My mom has a girl crush on Catherine-Zeta Jones. My brother-in-law has a bromance with Hugh Jackman. Plenty of straight-as-a-door manly men have their hickory-hard hearts carved with Steve McQueen's initials. Jared loves Woody Allen, but "only for his brains." Is anyone exempt from developing these same-gender, non-romantic attachments?

What propels hetero men and women the world over to develop these levels of admiration (is it love, envy, respect?) and then publicly designate them as such?

I was sure I didn't have any.
Not so.

Thinking back, not only do I indeed have girl crushes, my earliest GCs significantly predate Amelie. I think I've had them all along.

My first GC was Princess Buttercup. I thought she was like a cooler, real-life version of a Disney Princess. She had the perfect early nineties wave of long blond locks. She taught me not only did you have to have a dash of ladylike wit and grit, you had to be a fox to snag someone like young Cary Elwes. And wow, she's aged so well. I hope to look like her at 45.

Marry Sean Penn, a man way less attractive than me? As you wiiiiiissssh.

Next came Mia Hamm. Any young girl who hoped to play competitive soccer idolized Mia Hamm. I remember reading books about her, looking into UNC soccer camps, hanging posters of her in my room, and fighting tooth and nail to get the number 9 jersey on my team. (I lost, becoming number 10 for the rest of my career, which I later found out was a more "important" number anyway worn by Pele, Maradona, and now Messi).

 And she's an Olympian. Check. 

Gwyneth Paltrow. I developed a GC on her about the same time Brad Pitt did. I loved her in Emma and Great Expectations and I quickly decided I would never cut my hair again because she wore her blond hair so well. I thought she had class, style, and her alien-like body was made for designer clothes. And so, when I wrote pretty mediocre poetry in my school lit mag, I used "Gwyneth" as my penname. This GC probably died along with my high school poetry career.

I grew my hair. I grew my hair for you. And all the things you do. And it was tinted yell-ow.

I saw Big Fish when it came out and I remember thinking that Marion Cotillard was really beautiful in an interesting sort of way. She was like an even cuter French version of Audrey Tautou. I still think she's probably the most beautiful actress working today.

Then of course comes the trio of musician CGs.

Robyn, my fearless Swedish pop-pixie, who dances and dresses like a 5-year old and makes KILLER tunes to work out to. . .

. . . Oh Land, who is way too pretty to be anything other than a model, but has managed in spite of her Danish goodlooks  to become an avantgarde musician. (In another life, I could have made performance art for a living). . . .

. . . and Chan Marshall aka Cat Power. She is a fierce embodiment of Woman, power, confidence, and I love her voice. I want to sound like her when I talk, sing, or sneeze.

And rounding things out in GC land is the fictional Liz Lemon. Because she gets to say and do the dorky things I say and do, only she does them in public. She is either my fictional clone, or BFF. And because when I saw this scene for the first time, it was night and I was eating cheese, and I probably did a spit take.

and Yoko Ono.

Just kidding.


Okay. Now tell me I'm not alone here.  Confirm to me that the girl crush (and bromance) is a thing. Go.

Ten Times Ten

The boy is ten months old. Question Mark!
The mom is in love. Double Exclamation Mark!

There's that axiom that you don't know what it will feel like to love someone so much. That's true. You could try though. For me it's like this. Imagine swimming in a newly liquid sky through puffy cartoon clouds and that your arms stretch so far you can pull the entire world into your chest and hug it tight toward you, and then you craugh, which is a word I just made up that combines a deep belly laugh stirred up with a long, cleansing cry. Now cover that in cheese, not nacho cheese in a can type crap, but real good, real sharp cheese that's so pricey you can only afford to buy a few ounces at a time. Mix in all the chemical electric neurological reactions you will ever feel, from endorphins, seratonin, dopamine. This feels like the emotional analogue to the most designer drug. I'm sure Freud would have a field day here. But Freud is a schmohawk. And he never met this baby.

The intense love thing makes sense though. The Mormon faith teaches that the way to really love someone with pure, enduring, Christlike love is to serve them. Love=service. By that mark it becomes clear. I'm in the service of this little guy pretty much all day, every day, every week, etc. It came more natural to me that I would have guessed.

He is the most gentle, happy, intuitive, mild-mannered baby and little observer of life.  Sometimes he's so observant and focused I think he's an undercover baby journalist, taking notes on how often I clean his highchair and the kitchen in general, which is not. Muckracking all the day long. My baby Upton Sinclair.

Speaking of which, in addition to his normal developments, I am pleased to announce he is also reading The Jungle with perfect diction. With a head so big, I'd be disappointed with any lesser performance.

2012: Read

My favorite books this year were both nonfiction (one biography). I don't think that's ever happened. I've always enjoyed well-written nonfiction and duly acknowledge, when done right, it's as potent a form storytelling as anything else, but it has never held the near-magical, whizzpop allure for me that fiction does. Being said, it's taken a few fantastic journalists to top my list this year.

YAY!
Every Love Story is a Ghost Story by D.T. Max
Fiddler in the Subway by Gene Weingarten

OVERALL YAY
Most Evil by Steve Hodel
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
And Then We Came To The End by Josh Ferris


Every Love Story is a Ghost Story
Obviously, I enjoyed Max's piecing-together of my foremost literary idol and muse. Easy sell.

All writers "borrow" and I steal from him probably more than anyone else, just as he stole from DeLillo and Pynchon, and they stole from . . . .etc. I've written about DFW before, and my admiration for the man has only grown since I fortuitously stumbled across him my first week in the MFA. I've read about half of his work posthumously, and even more interviews and microbiographies, and I'm sure more will continue to surface. I knew a lot about him back then, and what I knew I greatly respected, but I loved this more complete portrait of the artist as a young (and brilliant) man.

As a undergrad, he was often a mess - a depressive, cocky, sweaty schlub - that much I knew - but it was nice to see how Max unearthed some new material that helps in understanding why he was those things. He was a gentle, polite midwesterner, in love with love and ideation and the Big Questions, but underneath he was battling some very real demons, including the depression that would ultimately claim his life. Though I don't find all his works brilliant (a handful's uber-postmodernism get in the way, big-time) DFW has always held some cosmic pull for me, and I'm starting to understand why.

I guess I could put it this way - I've read many books and stories and felt like I truly understood what the author (or characters) were getting at or going through. This empathy comes easy for me. What has NEVER happened, is that as I read about his life, I felt like he was somehow - in some metaphysical, corndog way - able to understand me. I'm reading all about his Illinois childhood and love of reading and sports and junk culture and all that, and I feel like as I'm reading about his life, he is understanding mine. There are major and syrupy logic problems here, which of course DFW, a born logician, would love to refute if he were living.

Also, I loved this essay he wrote on cruises in the 90's. I just reread it after I went on my inaugural cruise last week and it made me laugh even more the second time.


Fiddler in the Subway
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Gene Weingarten came out of nowhere for me. I'd never even heard of the man. My father-in-law gave Jared this book in the spring, and the two of us kept stealing it off each other's nightstands for months. We'd be in bed each reading our books, and one of us would laugh out loud, or say "did you read this one? This one is great."

It's not often that I've loved any complication of stories in its entirety, but I'd say that was the case here. He's a very funny writer and he's picked some grand topics. All of its enjoyable, but my favorite stories actually come closer to the end of the book. "The Armpit of America" made me LOL a few times, "Doonesbury's War" and "None of the Above" were some of the best non-political political essays I've read in a long time, and "Fatal Distraction" left me in tears. Like, ugly, crying-alone-in-my-bed-in-pajamas-at-11-in-the-morning- tears.  Recommended.

The others I will only say a little about.

Most Evil. Most fascinating story of a Marquis de Sade type serial killer, (written by his homicide detective son!) Quick, someone make a miniseries!

Outliers. Finally got around to reading this, though it's been on my nightstand for more than a couple years. It's interesting, easy. I'm amazed how often I'm able to join conversations based on what I've learned from these stories.

And Then We Came To The End feels close to home for anyone who's worked in an office for a long period of time, where your co-workers somehow spend more time with you than anyone else, and you know about their medical problems in more detail than you should, and their love lives, and you've memorized there wardrobe entirely. Even funnier if you've worked in advertising. You'll get all the inside jokes and there are some ones in there that ring both hilarious and true.

2012: Music

Don't you know I only listen to NPR now? And old mix CDs with the likes of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Fleetwood Mac and whatever my friend Sam gave me in college? And like, lots of Robyn when I'm working out?

I'm changing the title of this category.

AUDIO

YAY
Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. Any episode with Paula Poundstone.
Just look at that face. And tie.

NAY
Music in 2012. I think? Anything worth hearing? I sort of feel weird about Paula's image representing this category.