Musical Monday's Quote of the Night

After a catch-up dinner with Brady and Emma at the surprisingly spacious Chelsea branch of Grey Dog, the three of us went to Splash and met Leah, Jami, and Mark for Musical Monday. (We also ran into the Twins, which is not actually that surprising.) I didn't see this until tonight, which still baffles me:


The color commentary is always the best part of Musical Mondays, but Leah wins quote of the night for this one:

R: "I'm not really sure about her dress."
L: "It makes you realize that Susan Boyle kind of looks like Grimace."

Time Just Flies

WHAT ACK HOW IS IT MARCH. March 1 means that I have three more months of (field)work before I have to figure out whether I'm staying in NYC or going somewhere else this summer before going back to Oxford to hunker down in a library this fall. (It is officially the point where I should stop ordering books at approximately quadruple the rate that I can read them.) The last couple of months are going to fly by extra fast because I'm supposed to go to Miami, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore, and DC on six of the weekends, which means that I have very few weekends to putter around the apartment reading novels and disabling the smoke detectors to try cooking new things. I'm badly going to miss that - it's been seven years since I've lived in one place for more than nine months, and I very much like the set-up I've got in NYC. I'm torn between anticipation and being like, ugh, my kingdom for a permanent address and possessions that cannot be rapidly collapsed into two suitcases and a carry-on bag.

Speaking of mobility, I'm currently really into two of my friend's blogs - Mike's in New York and Magali's in Vanuatu. We all talked about Magali's today at Teaism in DC when it came up and we all agreed that we should send her shampoo and we hope she is still alive.

Panel FTW

I was not optimistic about speaking on this panel up by the UN today - mostly because yesterday, I wore grown-up clothes to attend this colloquium at Columbia Law and managed to spill an entire bowl of pasta and tomato sauce down the front of myself about twenty minutes before I had to leave the office to go to Morningside Heights. (It really throws you when you catch someone looking at your shoes and realize that they're covered in bright red spots and that you look like a young Bret Easton Ellis character.) I feel like spilling food on yourself should disqualify a person from any kind of public speaking for at least 24 hours.

And then this morning, I woke up and it was snowing outside, which is terrible news because my only shoes have absolutely zero traction and I have to walk carefully and in an almost bowlegged fashion to get anywhere without totally wiping out. When I'm walking in the snow in dress shoes, I keep my hands out of my pockets to flail more efficiently and don't even buy coffee, because there is a very good probability that it the majority of it will end up giving third degree burns to myself or those around me.

But today, I made it all the way to the UN without anything going wrong, and spoke on the panel without any slapstick disasters along the way. Tremendous! And we're celebrating in the apartment by drinking wine product, because we've almost exhausted all of the leftover wine from our holiday party. Where blizzards don't get me, wine product typically does.

We Put the OK in Book Club

On the off chance that anyone saw Jeopardy tonight, Graham Norris is my new celebrity boyfriend. I knew I had seen him somewhere, and then they did that part where they try to make smart people's lives sound interesting and I realized that he was the guy who played Rayna's stalker on an episode of Dollhouse and has featured as the boyish psychotic in a bunch of horror films (including, but not limited to, Rest Stop 2: Don't Look Back). It takes a lot to vault to celebrity boyfriend status, but he wagered $13 in Final Jeopardy and that pretty much sealed it. I felt like it really rattled Alex Trebek.

I was going to write about Murakami's After the Quake and how the first outing of Wendy's book club was a rocking success, but the fact that my night consisted of watching Jeopardy and going to a book club has suddenly made me extremely self-conscious.

Olympics!

I haven't really been following the Olympics at all, except that we watched curling last week because it is so fun to watch Swedish women shout encouragement to each other in Swedish as they freak out and scrub the ice. (If I weren't so technologically inept, I would make a dance remix out of it immediately.) And now Brady and I are thinking of ways that the ski cross could be improved to be even more exciting. The suggestions thus far are landmines and combining it with actual motocross. My vote is for all of the weapons in MarioKart to be added to the race, but I am totally open to suggestions. And this is why I do not follow sports.

Flying Kittens

David asked me how much it cost to fly a kitten through quarantine from the UK back to the US. I was like, "I don't know, look it up." And this is what I got in return.

This is why we can't be put in charge of a living thing.

Life and Other Zero-Sum Games

I got a call from Lee when I was finishing dinner and writing up notes from today, saying that he was stuck at work and asking if I could go over to his place and walk Tabitha so she didn't wet the floor or get a urinary tract infection or explode in a burst of white fur and bile. I said yes, figuring that I could bring my work with me and go to Amy's Bread afterwards to grab some coffee and work on editing this chapter. With that thought in mind, I spent the whole walk over romanticizing advocacy work, and thinking about how lucky I am to have a job where I'm usually back in my apartment in time to shout abuse at Jeopardy contestants and plod through the work for my dissertation.

I began to rethink this about forty-five minutes later, when I realized that I had a dollar in my wallet and a dozen loose coins at the bottom of my messenger bag, and had to dig through the dish of coins by Lee's bedside to exchange nickels and dimes for quarters so that I could get a small coffee without having to pay for the whole thing with a fistful of nickels.

Upon reflection, I think we both made the right choice in a lot of ways.