“The truth seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates.”

-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

• Nevertheless?  Proper grammar confuses me.
• We were at my in-laws’ house, then my parents’, now we’re home and there’s Christmas stuff everywhere but I’m pretty done with Christmas.  I want all the decorations to be gone.  Taking down all the ornaments and putting them in their boxes with two semi-helpful grade-schoolers and one very unhelpful toddler overwhelms me.  Maybe this afternoon I’ll  tackle it while a certain baby sleeps.
• Last night my husband asked if I’d like x amount of money for my birthday to blow on whatever I’d like.  My first thought was, What will the kids buy me? Because I love seeing what they come up with.  Then I thought, I do not need enough stuff to come anywhere near that amount of money.  But as I laid in bed last night I thought of new everyday dishes and cups that would be nice to replace my stained ones, then how my gray cardigan that I throw on three times a week is wearing out and missing a button, and I thought of sprucing up my living room, and suddenly that amount of money Hubby offered is nowhere near enough.  Greed rears its ugly head.
• While in Tulsa with my parents I snuck away one night to spend some time with my friend Heidi.  I sat in her pretty living room and drank peppermint tea and caught up with a precious friend.  There are few people with whom you can indulge the small talk only for a bit before getting to the banter reserved for dear friends.  Heidi is one of those people.  My friend Amy in Kansas City is the same way.  Last summer we ate dinner at Granite City and in no time she was making me giggle with her stories just like when we were in college.  And Gina in Kansas City (maybe you remember I kind of started the blog for those two?) has these eyes that make you believe you can tell her anything.  And then of course I spill my guts.  I never see either any of those three, but when I do it’s right back to me oversharing and leaving their company with a full heart.
• I want a date night with my husband.
• Hooray for beautiful weather on Christmas break!  Maybe I’ll be able to take a precious picture of my children and send out some New Year’s cards.  Maybe.

Daphne and I went to the mall today so that I could buy some blush for myself and glasses for Mia.  I can only tell you that because Mia does not yet read this blog, although she very well could be by next semester.  Last night she read “The Moon in My Room” and a level 1 reader “Bolt.”  The night before she read “Morris the Moose,” then this morning over breakfast she read a couple pages from “Wow Wow Wubbzy.”  She loves reading, that girl.  Takes after her father and a younger version of her mother.

Back to the mall.  I find it very interesting that teenagers love the smell that rushes out the door and up into your brain from Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister.  They must, because Victoria’s Secret is now doing the same thing.  You can’t walk by those stores without smelling like cologne that is all at once overpriced and repulsive to anyone over 19.  My sister Hayley and her husband Todd walked by Abercrombie once and witnessed a sales associate spraying cologne on each and every shirt in a pile.  When you walk by the store you initially think they must do that because of the way the smell permeates every molecule of air within a 20 foot radius outside the door, but then logic says, “No, surely not,” because WASTEFUL, and don’t the children who work there need their olfactory nerves after they move on?  And what about the parents of the children who work there?  I’m guessing they make their kids strip down and shower outside before coming in the house after a shift.

It’s exactly the opposite of the wasp-noise that that store in England discovered.  I can’t find it via Google, but some store owner in England found out that teenagers could hear a buzzing wasp noise that adults’ ears could not hear, so the shop owner played the noise to keep teenagers away.  I was skeptical until the minister at our church in Tulsa played a noise and asked if anyone could hear it.  For a split second I thought it was a joke along the lines of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” but immediately the entire youth group raised their hands, without thinking.  I was only in my mid-twenties at the time, but it was right then I knew I was old.  My ears had already begun giving up.

So apparently teenagers don’t like annoying sounds but are down with pungent odors.  I’m thinking this information might come in useful in the future, I’m just not sure how.

Hubby is out with his friends, “out” meaning hanging at our friends’ house (sans wives, of course) to watch a new 3-D TV.  The boys get together at night, without spouses or children, and the girls get together during the day, without husbands but WITH children.  And when the boys go out at night without the kids, we still have the kids.  I’m not complaining because the husbands are good about letting us girls go out together at night, but we never do.  The last time was maybe February or March?  So basically never.  Again, I’m not stomping my foot and pouting “That’s not fair,” just saying maybe us girls should change it up sometimes. [edit: Of course, they are at Mr. Y's house while his kids are upstairs, but I'm betting MRS. Y is the one taking care of the kiddos as they wake up and need a drink of water.]

So I made chocolate mug cake, topped it with ice cream and walnuts, and watched “Harold and Maude.”  Now, that movie has been on our Netflix queue for quite a while, probably even before I went out with my girlfriends sans children (Which, now that I think about it, has been well over a year.  One of us keeps having a nursing baby that we have to bring along.), but I’ve never watched it.  I’ve always been too worried about the creepy factor.  Just how far would they push the romance of a young (college age?) boy and a 79-year-old woman?  There were some creepy parts, but I think for the most part it was a sweet movie.  In case you ever decide to watch it, let me know, and I’ll warn you about the parts you should skip through.

Now I’m googling pictures of Alexa Chung because I want to copy her wavy messy hair.  If you look at my most-used board on Pinterest you’ll see lots and lots of bobs, as in haircuts.  Bob haircuts.  And they all look pretty much the same.  I just want my haircut to not look like the hair of a 30-year-old mom who gave up, you know?  So I’ve been staring at people’s hair and trying to decide how to make mine match theirs.  Once, after our weekly date at the bakery (with kids, of course), I came home and cut swoopy bangs to look like Chrissa’s.  But my hair still doesn’t look like hers.  Hers is shinier and try as I might, I cannot get my double-processed, bleached hair to shine like hers.  I’d like to do the blunt bangs of Ellen Barkin or Scarlett Johansson or Katie Holmes, but that’s scary.  Jayme cut them on her long hair and I can’t wait to see them.  Anyway, Alexa Chung has blunt bangs, so I’ve been looking at the pictures that some people creepier than me have put on their blogs that are totally devoted to her.

Every time I hear Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” I think of Estella from Great Expectations and I’m sad for her.  Then I want to read more Dickens.  Have you guys read Great Expectations yet?  Do.  It is such a wonderful book.  If you’re not laughing out loud in the first chapter then put it down, get yourself a cup of coffee and a clear head, then sit down and try it again.  If you’re still not laughing out loud in the first chapter then you’re reading it wrong.  That’s okay, because I did the first time, too.  But Dickens is so incredible at making you laugh while feeling the fear of a six-year-old boy all at once.  Then you grow up with Pip and love him and you love Joe and that whole world and then, 496 pages later it’s suddenly finished and you have to find another book that will be as satisfying to spend your time on.  Probably I should try Oliver Twist or A Christmas Carol but I fear it’s too late in the Christmas season for the latter and I don’t want to be sad with the previous.

Speaking of Joe Gargery, let’s name some of our favorite characters from literature.  Off the top of my head: Joe Gargery from Great Expectations, John Jarndyce from Bleak House (I’ve never read the book but did see the BBC Miniseries with the adorable Carey Mulligan, and I love John Jarndyce)(also, Bleak House is another Dickens novel, so of course I’d love it if I read it), and John Ames from Gilead.  Now, my favorites are stacked with characters from books I’ve just read, but I think it goes along with the fact that I refuse to read anything that’s not encouraging.  I want to have the love and forgiveness these characters have.  Also, I love the narrator in Sonny’s Blues.  Not that he’s as altruistic as the others, but that short story has been one of my favorites since I discovered short stories, so I should probably name him as a favorite character in literature.

Who is your favorite person from the Bible?  You are not allowed to say Jesus.  Mine is Peter because that man was a mess.  He was impulsive and lost his faith as quickly as he got it, spoke out of turn and was heartily reprimanded but still stayed close to Jesus, denied his Lord three times during his precious friend’s greatest need, and yet Jesus built His church upon him.  Through all his weakness he loved Jesus.  Really, really, really loved Him.  I can get behind that.  Paul is too sure of himself; that is nothing like me.  I think if we hung out he would look at me sideways and call me out on my stuff.  Daniel would be interesting.  He was a smarty and I admire his resolve.

[Another edit, for you guys who are up at 11:08 on a Saturday night and reading my blog as quickly as it posts: that guy from Cracked appears to have been totally right about the next Batman.  Behold.]

Okay, I’m going to wrap it up now.  I’m going to re-read Sonny’s Blues and continue listening to the “erin’s faves” playlist on our iTunes.  You guys have a good night.

My sister loaned me a handful of books late last Spring and I’m finally getting around to reading the second one of the lot, Gilead.  There doesn’t seem to be much of a plot yet and so it takes me a lot of effort to stay interested.  But I do love it.  It’s quiet and meandering and has some golden nuggets of prose.  This one made me laugh out loud:

But I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books.  This is not a new insight, but the truth of it is something you have to experience to fully grasp.

And this one, where the protagonist talks about baptizing a litter of cats as a child:

Two or three of that litter were taken home by the girls and made into fairly respectable house cats.  Louisa took a yellow one.  She still had it when we were married.  The others lived out their feral lives, indistinguishable from their kind, whether pagan or Christian no one could ever tell.  She called her cat Sparkle, for the white patch on its forehead…One of the boys said she should have named it Sprinkle.  He was a Baptist, a firm believer in total immersion, which those cats should have been grateful I was not.

]]> http://erinslittlecorner.com/2011/11/03/quotes/feed/ 1 http://erinslittlecorner.com/2011/10/30/the-pitfalls-of-trendy/ http://erinslittlecorner.com/2011/10/30/the-pitfalls-of-trendy/#comments Sun, 30 Oct 2011 18:29:06 +0000 Erin http://erinslittlecorner.com/?p=1954

We went to the K-State game yesterday and some of those college girls dressed so cute.  But I feel like a lot of them could benefit from the following chart before next leaving their dorm room/sorority house/apartment:

(found at i-am-bored.com)

Thanks to my husband and Cracked.com (sorry for their potty language but it’s a fun read) for the following video.

Things to remember while watching:

• The calf survives.
• Look for the first lion who runs away and the second lion that gets thrown into the air.
• “Always bet on the water buffalo.” -Hubby

On unabashedly wearing a cute sequined top you found at the thrift store:

Yet it’s one step to buy the sequins and it’s another leap to actually wear them. I used to be afraid of the sparkle, worried about what people would say about me behind my back until I just got over it. Meh. Some people wear Sponge Bob Square Pants pajama bottoms to sign their mortgage papers, and I wear sequins to go for a walk. There is room for all kinds of fashion choices on this earth. Isn’t that nice? My heart is warmed.

-from a Canadian girl I don’t know (but love to read), at this post.

Back before Hubby and I went skiing in March he found a movie on Netflix he thought we should watch: a movie about three friends who get stuck on a ski lift after/during the last run of the day, watch the resort close below them, then must figure out how to survive during the frigid temperatures before the resort opens again a week later.

Um, no.

The first time we went skiing, back in December ’08, my biggest fear next to the ski lift breaking and snapping us hundreds of feet into the air before smacking our bodies onto the hard earth below was, in fact, getting stuck on a lift–feet dangling high above the snow with no way down.

But a couple weeks ago, safe in the sweltering heat of the Kansas summer, I decided we could finally watch that movie.  Their cold could not affect me or influence my brain to nightmares.

Then a week or so later we watched Black Death, about the Black Death (how’d you guess) and a secret delegation sent by the church to squash a remote English Village that had not succumbed to the Plague.  Their thinking was that everyone was coming down with the plague so if the inhabitants of this village were disease-fee they must be witches.  Not that they’d simply BATHED, as I learned in my sixth-grade geography class was all that was needed to keep yourself Plague-free.

As we watched that horror movie, horror movies being a genre I specifically stay away from, I realized I’d watched two decidedly boy movies in two weeks and he sooo owed me a romance.

Tonight I’m calling that in.  Only I can’t find one I want to watch.

What I really want is Keira Knightley’s Pride and Prejudice but Netflix doesn’t stream that one.  And nothing of the romance variety is interesting to me on Redbox.

So what are your suggestions?  Even though by the time you read this and comment (I assume you have better things to do on your Saturday night than help me out with a chick-flick) it will be Monday at the earliest and Hubby and I will have already watched a movie, but I did watch two of his movies, so maybe he can watch two of mine.    Tell me what you suggest.  Hubby and I both thank you.

You know I hate car shopping.  The drive to the lot, the knowledge that pretty soon a salesperson will accost us and attempt to persuade us into purchasing a vehicle 30% over the budget we told them, the test drive wherein you feel uncomfortable pushing all the buttons and inspecting the vehicle because that salesperson is along for the ride and chattering in your ear.

But I am also tired of the Beast.  It served us well but I want something clean and shiny.

So Thursday night Hubby, the kids and I drove to Brian Begley Auto Plaza.  We parked, got out, and as we looked in the windows of the vehicle that interested me on their website, their son (I think? since they don’t have salespeople) walked over and handed us the key so we could look inside.  Then he walked away.  He didn’t hover and ask us questions and push the vehicle while Hubby and I tried to ignore him as we attempted a secret conversation utilizing eye rolls and just-between-us expressions.  A little bit later Trish Begley walked up to see if we wanted to go on a test drive.  G, Little Missy and I drove around in that SUV and Trish didn’t come with us.  Upon our return she asked us how we liked it, told us they’d be closed next week but would be back the next, and then let us go on our way.

That was a good experience.

We decided to try the Suzuki dealership in Wichita because Todd had a great experience with them.  On our way there we drove through an UNNAMED TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT lot and as we cruised through–as in we hadn’t parked but were still moving inside the Beast–a salesman chased us down in his golf cart and asked if he could help us find anything.  Writing this and looking back, I guess maybe he didn’t want us to leave frustrated if we couldn’t find exactly what we were looking for, but at the time we were annoyed because Hubby had to stop, roll down the window and politely say we were just driving through.  THE VEHICLE IN MOTION MIGHT HAVE BEEN A GOOD INDICATION OF THIS.

At the Suzuki lot Jimmy came out asked if he could help with anything, and when I asked for a specific vehicle he helped me locate it.  Then the only reason he stayed is because I kept asking him questions.  When the big kids and I went on a test drive he didn’t come with us.  I don’t even think he stayed next to Hubby on the lot and bored him with small talk.  No, he took my name, gave me a card and let me go on my way.

Those two salespeople I can handle.  I even kind of  liked them.

There’s a guy at Hubby’s work who offered to buy the Toyota.  I really wanted to sell it to him.  Imagining myself in a vehicle with leather seats and un-stained carpets puts me in my happy place.  But, blech, the thought of a car payment every month.  I thought I was mentally prepared for one but I’m just not.

So we’re holding off on a purchase for a while.  Maybe not forever, but at least a while.