Archive for: July, 2010

Free for All Friday vol. 2 no. 2

Jul 30 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Free for all Friday

So, FfaF is still lacking in food. I just don’t have any ideas about what I want to eat all the time or what you all want to eat all the time. Cheese was out there for a while, but wow, that’s a huge category. So, you know, still working on that.

Meanwhile!

  • Meowmania!

    Speaking of cats, would you like one? I have several spare. Like, 6 spare, plus several two-day old kittens that will be ready for homes in a few weeks. Help me not become a crazy cat lady, please!

  • Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

    THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal.

  • Israel and the Surrender of the West, by Shelby Steele:

    It doesn’t matter that much of the world may actually know better. This template has become propriety itself, a form of good manners, a political correctness. Thus it is good manners to be outraged at Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and it is bad manners to be outraged at Hamas’s recent attack on a school because it educated girls, or at the thousands of rockets Hamas has fired into Israeli towns—or even at the fact that Hamas is armed and funded by Iran. The world wants independent investigations of Israel, not of Hamas.

  • Long-exposure photography
  • How to Drink Like Mad Men: the rules, the booze, the gear and the recipes. I’d just like to take this opportunity to say, “Ha! Tanqueray! IN YOUR FACE, SKILLZY!”

    That right there is not an example of being smooth like a mad man or like Joan Holloway, but it felt good.

  • Related:
  • Toward an Entitlement Society. What do you think?
  • A Brief History of Computer Icons
  • Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege
  • How to Wear White, tips from 1948
  • A Brief Flowchart History of Lolcats
  • From Apollo, Five Second Film: Hipster Superman
  • One man’s thoughts on the redefinition of the word “justice.” I think a lot of what he has to say has merit, especially this:

    When someone is trying to change the meaning of a word, it pays to perk up one’s ears and ask why.

  • Via Honu Girl, Whooping Cough: Back with a Vengeance.

    California’s epidemic has blossomed in a state that gives some of the most generous “personal belief exemptions” from vaccination — and the epidemic’s worst hot spots neatly correlate with the most concentrated areas of vaccine refusal.

    Just like the measels!

  • Are you a cosmetics hoarder? Here’s a handy checklist. I’m not. I can’t imagine buying pretty makeups and not using them!
  • Why Edward Cullen Sparkles: A Scientific Paper of True Facts of Science.
  • The Year America Dissolved

    When hubris sent America in pursuit of overseas empire, the venture coincided with the offshoring of American manufacturing, industrial, and professional service jobs and the corresponding erosion of the government’s tax base, with the advent of massive budget and trade deficits, with the erosion of the fiat paper currency’s value, and with America’s dependence on foreign creditors and puppet rulers.

Phew. Little political today. But boozy, with a tasty Harry Potter finish.

3 responses so far

So, the People I’ll Be Working With… What are They Like?

Jul 28 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery, Gratuitous Movie Quote

STANDARD NERDS!!!

One response so far

Stuff about Lipsticks and Cameras

Jul 27 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Confession

I would like for it to be fall now, not only because it’s too damn hot to live, but because when the weather is cooler, I feel like I have a lot more lipstick options.

Since we last talked about lipstick, I have probs doubled my collection. I am not kidding. I gave in, went nuts, and am now keeping my collection mostly in two 3×5 index card holders, but they are no longer sufficient to the task and so those are full and my overflowing makeup bag has liners and stains and my desk has five different lipsticks in it and I’ve always got four or five things in my purse and wow.

And also I got obsessed with nail polish and doing my nails every day and that’s a collection unto itself.

I want to start beauty blogging a bit, but my camera died and it would cost more to send it to Canon to fix it than it would to just go to Wal Mart and buy a new point-and-shoot (which would, funnily enough, have about twice the megapixels) and so come pay day, maybe I will take more pictures of my lip products for you to enjoy or ignore, at your leisure.

One response so far

This is How I Feel

Jul 25 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Speechifying

Today, I feel like this:

4 responses so far

Free for All Friday Volume Two Number One The Refreeforallening

Jul 23 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Free for all Friday

So this is your new, probs not improved Free for All Friday. Since we last did these, I’ve completely changed my reading habits. I cheerfully use google reader now and subscribe to about 200 different blogs. I use the “share” and “share with note” feature A LOT. And getting into that habit, I think, has made it a bit harder for me to determine what should, and should not be, FfaF material. Among any other comments you might make today, please let me know what are the sorts of things you’re interested in reading here, or having here. You know you can always send me stuff, and it will appear.

And just to get it out of the way, I think I’m done with the bacon, y’all. I am just baconed out. I’ll eat it, certainly. But I am no longer willing to commit time to scouring the internet for tasty bacon recipes. I am, however, willing to entertain the idea of another food or foods or something that we could all get excited about every week. Please make suggestions. And don’t just say, “meat.” It’s a big internet.

Otherwise, here we go. Remember that if you’re going to get down and dirty, you need to do it in the pudding. Otherwise, high fives all around.

3 responses so far

Vocabulary Goals

Jul 22 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Brand New Words

Y’all, while I was suffering from depression, ennui, adult onset ADD (lazyness, easy distractability), greater and lesser degrees of drunkeness, and some truly stupendous degrees of drunkeness, and as such, not blogging, I spent a lot of time reading books.

Which is to say, when I wasn’t funneling prozac down my gullet with jeroboams of wine, I read. I am thinking of making a list of books here, but mostly you could go to my Goodreads page and friend me there, because I do tend to keep it updated.

Point is! Books! I read them. But! I didn’t take notes on new words. Occasionally I learned a new word and thought, “Oh, I should blog that.” Then I came over all sweaty and shaky and had to go get another drink.

Blogging anxiety or the DTs– they’re so similar.

Anyway, two words, or one word and a suffix, I am trying to use lately:

  1. “rad” as in, “This sobriety thing is rad.”*
  2. “-balls” as a replacement for -ly, as in “Last night we got amazeballs drunk and played mariokart and I came in third!”**

Do you all have vocabulary goals? Is it strange to have vocabulary goals?

* Or so I hear.
** That’s totes a lie. I came in 12th.

2 responses so far

Have You Tried Turning It Off and Back On Again?

Jul 20 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Geekery, Gratuitous Movie Quote

Okay, for the resurrected &c version of the Wednesday Soupcon of Geekery, I’m going to start with The IT Crowd, which I have been watching compulsively for two weeks now. I can’t stop and I never want to.

No, there you go, I just heard it come on. No, that’s the music you hear when it comes on. No, that’s the music you hear when… I’m sorry, are you from the past?

2 responses so far

So…

Jul 19 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Reflexive

What’s new with you all? Tell me about yourselves, what you’re up to. What do you all want to talk about? Is there anything you’d like me to talk about? Do you all want to keep doing geek movie quotes on Wednesdays? Do you want me to bring back Free for All Friday? Has anybody seen Lady Glutter? I need to email her. I have been a shitty friend.

3 responses so far

By Popular Demand

Jul 15 2010 Published by Sarah, etc. under Confession

Hi y’all.

Last week, I spent a fantastic afternoon in Georgia visiting Poptart. We were eating and bemoaning the travesty that is tea without ice and out of the blue, in answer to a question I wasn’t really sure I’d asked, she said, “Or you could start blogging again.”

Christopher, sitting across from us, eating a panini, and drinking an iceless fruit punch, choked. Once he got his breathing under control he said, “People keep telling her that.”

“Really?” Poptart asked.

“Really,” Christopher said.

“Yeah,” I continued. “I go out with Chez and Apollo and one of them says something funny and I say, ‘Oh, somebody needs to tweet that.’ Then one of them says, ‘No, you need to blog it.’ I say, ‘Bah.’”

“You do!” Chorused Poptart.

“Apollo calls it a near-blogging experience,” I added.

Poptart and Christopher laughed and I prodded at my salad while they continued to talk.

Everybody who knows me, who knows this blog, who ever read it, seems to be waging a subtle campaign to bring it back. “If only for Free for All Friday!” They say. Honu Girl, who’s there to hold my hand when, in the twice that I’ve fired things up since last Christmas, I’ve had full on panic attacks, says to do what I think is best, always subtly nudges me toward writing again.

The only person I haven’t really heard from is Doc. But he got as sick as I did last winter, so I send him good, loving thoughts and hope he’s happy.

Meanwhile, y’all, last winter I got very, very sick. Heartsick and soulsick and everybitofmesick til I didn’t want to get out of bed, because I’d just go back a few hours later; I didn’t want to eat because I’d just have to do it again a few hours later. I didn’t want to talk, or sing, or write, or bathe, or eat, or talk or anything. I just wanted to lie in bed and sleep, or not. First I stopped commenting on stories, then I stopped reading them. I stopped chatting. I stopped emailing. I stopped writing. I stopped singing. I stopped reading anything. I stopped talking. I stopped getting out of bed. The only times I got out of bed were to work and to run. Go to work; run five miles. Rinse. Repeat.

But I had a good husband and good friends to help me out. They pulled me out of bed and called on the parts of me that know that work is good, and success is right, and made me talk. And they made me tell them all these things. And then they said, “Sarah, it’s time for meds.” And I said, “Whatever. It’ll just be the same tomorrow.” And they said, “That may be. But tomorrow and then another tomorrow and then another tomorrow and eventually it won’t be that way.” And they were right.

I got some meds. And it took a while for them to kick in, as it always does. I got to the point where I couldn’t be bothered to tie my shoes. I got to the point where I couldn’t be bothered to type, and so sat staring a screen or two, hands in my lap, not thinking or feeling or anything. And then they kicked in and I started to feel better and better and better.

And now I look around what I feel like should be the wreckage of who I am, but it’s not particularly wrecked. It’s just a bit dusty, a little neglected, and needs a hug or two. If you’re reading this, I’d hug you. If you’re reading this it means you subscribe or, with mysterious faith, still click a link everyday or every week to see if something is still happening. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. This endeavor is as much about you as it is about me.

Sarah Et Cetera has always been more about community than cult of personality. In my imagination, I am a hostess at the swankiest of salons, providing scintillating topics and delicious refreshments for erudite people eager to discuss the issues of the day, philosophy, spaceships, and wizards together. And that’s what I still want to be.

So, don’t call it a come back, bitches, but here it is. Changes, of the big sort, coming soon. And no guarantees for weekday postings and ad-free-ness. I’ll post when I have something to say and sit tight when I don’t. I want to talk more about lipstick than anything else, so you know, there’s that. But I’ll be here.

If you want to be here with me, welcome. I heart you. Please stick around, help yourself, and let me and everybody else, know what’s on your mind. Sarah &C isn’t about me. It’s about all of us.

Love,
Math Girl

11 responses so far