Books Bought This Month
Books Borrowed This Month
Your Brain on Food by Gary L. Wenk
A Long Long Sleep by Anna Sheehan
Uprising by Margaret Peterson Haddix
The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt
Twice Told with drawings by Scott Hunt
Your Playlist Can Change Your Life by Galina Mindlin, Don DuRousseau, and Joseph Cardillo
Hex Hall by Rachel Hawkins
Clear Away the Clutter by Susan Wright
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter Continue reading
I am incredibly gifted at languages and linguistics. Not bragging, just saying. That’s my strong point. I can mimic the sounds of a foreign language after not much exposure. It only takes a little bit of partial or full immersion for me to start understanding the grammatical structure of a language, even if I don’t know any of the words. After four years of choir, a year of eighth-grade Latin, a semester of Portuguese, two and a half years of French, and many years of Spanish, I can recognize and “read” written languages, especially Germanic and Romance ones, competently enough. When I learn new words, I invariably pronounce them correctly. Languages are my strong point. We all have areas in which we excel, linguistic nuance happens to be one of mine.
So it’s interesting that last night I was writing a quick, informal review of a book on GoodReads, and I spent a great amount of time grasping for a word that I could literally see and hear, through some kind of curtain, in my head, but could not totally get out. I am very, very attached to my thesaurus, which is weird when you consider that I almost never need to look words up when I’m reading. I understand and remember the meaning of most English words, and I can look at them and probably tell you what language they come from, but I can’t call words up out of my head without a problem. And even though I can read a page of Spanish and be perfectly satisfied with the 80-100% I probably understood, I have a lot of difficulty translating word for word, and I absolutely hate it when people ask me “how do you say [blank] in Spanish?” because I cannot tell you, even if I previously spoke or read the word in question. I suppose my language skills are based on nuance, context, and intuition, not direct correlation. This is probably also why I don’t keep my languages separate in my brain, and why I don’t think I’ll ever be totally fluent in any of the languages I’ve studied, because they mix together. From growing up, my most comfortable way of talking about tropical fruit is to say the names in Portuguese, I use regionalisms and Spanglish slang, especially when talking about cultural or food things, I’m not funny except when I’m using Yiddish, and I adore learning new compound German nouns, because they are so damn good at expressing ideas. Continue reading
Posted in rambling
Tagged "philosophy", astrology, identity, language, procrastinating, psychology, wishful thinking
I’m not going to say I’m immune to media, because nobody in America is, but I’ve never really been one for dieting or anything crazy. In high school I once managed to stay on the Special K diet for two weeks before prom (I wanted to fit into my first designer dress that my mother had bought for me, because it was a size 0) and lose the weight I wanted to, but telling me to eat cereal is not a hardship, and the irony was that I lost the weight, but my skin was so pale looking that I ended up not looking good in the dress anyway, so I didn’t wear it.
Anyway. Then college happened, and I gained like 20 pounds and barely exercised and had steadily worsening breathing problems compounded by the wrong medication and bad stomach problems. When I was 21 1/2, I realized I was a pound away from having an officially overweight BMI, and that’s when I decided things had to change. Now, two years later, wellness is like a full-time job that never stops being challenging, but at least it’s now become more or less routine. But it easily gets boring, so I’m always looking for new recipes to make me excited about not eating potato chips, and new exercises and fitness magazines to make sure I’m never too bored to be healthy.
I have to be honest, though, and say that I need a lot of outside stimulation to make me excited about not eating out and not taking 24/7 advantage of my Hulu plus account. Much as I hate how dependent we all are on tiny computers that fit in our pockets, and much as I still have ZERO interest in owning a smartphone, one of the biggest things that helped me on my way was keeping a food and exercise diary on Self.com so that I could keep track of how I was doing. I think most of us can be tempted into doing a lot of things if it allows us to play with buttons and typing. Also, quite frankly, and I know this makes me seem more like a communist than the socialist I am, but I totally support any place of employment that requires some sort of commitment to wellness (and I also support those that require their employees–or highly encourage them–to be involved in volunteer or social justice work), because I think when it comes down to it, we all know that we need outside forces to get us to do anything that’s not X-Box or alcohol. Continue reading
I consider the fact that, if I’m planning on taking a full load of courses each summer and graduating in August of 2013, my first year of grad school won’t actually be over until July 31st, when I have my last class until after Labor Day. But I’ll write this anyway.
I don’t want to do a sappy post of realizations and accomplishments and failures, so I’ll instead post some lists. I love lists. I have always loved making lists.
The first list: Words I have had to teach my computer this year so as to get rid of the annoying red squiggly underline Continue reading
Posted in school
Tagged accomplishment, adulthood, grad school, happy, identity, intelligence, pop culture
I kind of abandoned my food blog because I have too much stuff going on, but that doesn’t mean I abandoned my interest in food, health, or food books. I think that’s a love that will last a lifetime. But it’s always good to be reminded of why and how you stay healthy and happy through food. I think it’s especially important since I’ve otherwise been making so many other awesome, positive changes in my life. That’s why I recently read Susan Albers’ Eating Mindfully and The Naked Foods Cookbook by Margaret Floyd.
There’s something about buying a Kindle that makes you more willing to read self-help books. Eating Mindfully can definitely be categorized as such, but it also makes some really good points about eating smaller meals, enjoying the smell of your food before you eat it, and taking time to enjoy the entire process of food, from buying the groceries to chopping them up. Albers brings up psychological and physiological reasons to eat more slowly and mindfully, and makes points that should appeal to a variety of readers, from those who are interested in New Age sap and those who just want to lose weight. She quotes Buddha, cites quotes and results from her own patients, and gives little exercises to do. You can write yourself a mindful eating contract, learn how to meditate, or take time to use your five senses. Continue reading
Posted in the diet
Tagged "philosophy", books, food, happy, positivity, review, the diet
Books Bought This Month
Katarina by Kathryn Winter
A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell
Down a Dark Hall by Lois Duncan
Books Borrowed This Month
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009 edited by Elizabeth Kolbert
True Notebooks by Mark Salzman
The Sisters Grimm: Fairy Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley
The Academie by Amy Joy
Continue reading
I have said that I don’t like Lady Gaga, and that’s true. “Bad Romance” and “Telephone” are the only songs that I can stomach, and her videos freak me out. I also don’t think she’s all that innovative, and every time people say that she’s doing something no one has ever done before, I ask them if they were asleep when Madonna and David Bowie were big. I also don’t think it’s a really legitimate thing to say that the point of being a crazy performance artist with no rhyme or reason is to trick people into paying attention, or to make some kind of statement that art is arbitrary, because all of that is just silly. To be clear, I’m also not a big fan of most electronica, because I think you can’t define things as “music” unless they have melodies and include at least one instrument or voice that comes from a physical being or object. But I do reserve a few electric-y tracks for when I work out or clean my apartment.
But it just struck me that my argument somewhat falls apart when I consider that I very much like listening to (and watching videos of) Marina and the Diamonds
Posted in music
Tagged famous people, fashion, music, pop, pop culture, wishful thinking
