The pin-striped men of morning

I have this sort of complicated love/hate fixation with Rilo Kiley et al. and today on the bus ride home I had a realization -- listening to Jenny Lewis sing makes me want to be a woman. I texted this epiphany to the one person who I thought would understand this phenomenon best, and he wrote back "omg! me too!"

Yesterday I had a mostly zone out day, partly to practice for my vacation, I suppose. Partly the weather was crappy and I felt no inclination to leave the house at all. Except I needed quarters to do laundry. After a few hours, I managed to make myself walk to the currency exchange, and as a reward, rented two fluffy movies from the Redbox. I got The Invasion and Superbad, and I have to say, I actually enjoyed them both. I recommend low expectations and non-sobriety. I was really surprised by The Invasion, as it got horrid reviews, but I think if you are a fan of the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and movies of that time and genre, you can appreciate aspects of this new version. It was kind of a good bad movie. Like Transformers, which I watched last week. Because during all the really bad dialogue, I was cackling nonstop because they obviously took it DIRECTLY from the original cartoons.

I have a few things to finish up before vacation, but I have three days which is plenty of time to do it. Mostly I need to complete and send off this fellowship application. I've been working on tweaking the opening chapter of my novel, though I am feeling a bit torn about whether I send them 30 pages of this new work, which I'm more jonesed about but is much less polished, or 30 pages of my other novel which has some superb writing (um, if I do say so myself....I was meaning more in the revised, polished sense when I said it, but ok). Topically, I find it makes me skin crawl. I think I might do the latter only because they want to see what's representative of my work, there's no promise of what project I'm doing. But even the thought of opening up that document is making me queasy. I'll sleep on it. Maybe in the morning I will be kinder to it.

Four days! I leave Friday morning! I have new seersucker shorts to wear! And vacation boxers! I still need to buy suntan lotion.

Also, I know everybody's doing it, but I do like this Vampire Weekend record. I also like the new Cat Power too. There, I said it. Between this and the Jenny Lewis confession, I feel so much better.

A list of things that are making it a little better.

1. Chicken mango sausage
2. The smell of basmati rice in the kitchen
3. Having a big container of it in the fridge to eat with any random meal or snack.
4. Pear sauce. (like applesauce, but a million times better)
5. http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/ [If you haven't been in a few days, they keep adding more! And read all the way back to #1!]
6. my therapist
7. playing Scrabulous on Facebook
8. the new season of Lost
9. discovering that I can watch the mini-version of ABC.com shows at work
10. mixes by DJ Itchy Fingers as introduced to me by dommeyourass
11. while we're on the topic of music, Lyrics Born and Rhymefest and The National because they all have great voices that sound intimate and lovely in my headphones.
12. trying to work the word "Joementum" into a conversation with broqued
13. using kettlebells at the gym
14. noticing that my exercises are working because when i'm slipping on the ice, my balance is better so i'm not falling (knock on wood) nor am i pulling a muscle from trying to gain my balance (this has happened in past winters)
15. the frosted brownie that came free with my dinner