This has got to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long, long, time. Neil Patrick Harris is definitely the bomb.

And d’oh, now that I read the attached pages, I realize it is a Joss Whedon production, which explains it’s awesomeness pretty well.  I was just thinking it reminded me a lot of the Buffy musical episode.  

It’s only streaming through July 20, so check it NOW!

A challenge passed along by my friend Alex, based on ’The Big Read’, from the NEA, designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They came up with a list of their top 100 books and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these books. I’ve highlighted the ones I’ve read. Cut and paste into your blog and let us know which you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (70% of the plays, only a few of the poems)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (a good many of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So, at 59 (not including those series I haven’t read completely) I guess I’m above average, like all the children in Lake Wobegon.  And, yeah, I managed to get through eons of education without reading Moby Dick or Ulysses–don’t tell!  And don’t tell the Admiral I still haven’t opened The Wasp Factory, after buying it a year ago.
It’s sort of a bizarre list, no?  A weird combo of classic children’s lit, stuff that’s been on high school and college reading lists for eons, and a random selection of 1990s bestsellers.  Also, why do they list The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe separately?   And counting the collected works of Shakespeare as one seems a bit unfair–reading 20 or 30 huge-ass plays still doesn’t count as much as reading some wimpy little bestseller? 
And, um, yeah, I’m really competitive about my nerdishness.
ADDENDUM: In checking back at the NEA Big Read site, I don’t find any mention of the above list, and tracking back from Alex’s link doesn’t help.  So I actually have no idea where that list originates.  These are the books listed as being part of the NEA’s current Big Read program–I’ve actually read a much bigger percentage of these:

Bless Me, Ultima
Fahrenheit 451
My Ántonia
The Great Gatsby
A Lesson Before Dying
The Maltese Falcon
A Farewell to Arms
Their Eyes Were Watching God
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Call of the Wild
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
The Shawl
The Grapes of Wrath
The Joy Luck Club
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
The Age of Innocence

where we just spent a week, and only hours after my husband and son left the area. 

Tragedy in Flagstaff

Hmm…not sure if I should feel cursed, or blessed that we’ve so far escaped any direct effects from these disasters.

This is what’s happening 12 miles from my house.

Here’s what it looks like from my neighborhood–hard to capture the gorgeous red sun on my cheapo camera, though.

and he IS very happy to see you.

Jeepers–this seems to happen at every animal show I go to!

Last week I went to visit my sister, who, after a quarter century in New York or its immediate environs, is soon planning to move away.  She’s having a hard time getting used to the idea, but so am I!  When I was young, I always thought I’d be the one to move to NY someday.  I was the one who had a subscription to The New Yorker at age 16, after all, and who was going to live in a garret and write the Great American Novel.  Or something.  But, no, she beat me to it, and after my first couple of visits, I was pretty sure city life was not for me.  But it sure is fun to play at it sometimes, and for the past quarter century, I’ve had a conveniently located and free home base for my NY visits, and I’ve taken full advantage of it.  So, thanks, sis!

Anyway, on the way home from this trip I started thinking about some of my previous trips there and figured I’d blog about some of them.  First, this most recent one–

This time, as so many of the others, I was combining work with pleasure–2 days at an academic conference with lots more time hanging out with my sister, her husband, and her 3-year and 4-week-old sons just outside the city–actually in a highrise overlooking Manhattan.  After the usual couple of days madly scrambling to finish my paper, I took the train in for the conference, presented, had drinks in a swanky hotel bar with some fabulous women I met there, and then was on my own. 

Someone mentioned that MOMA is free on Friday nights, and I was only a block away, so I took myself out to dinner at the excellent museum cafe and then wandered around a bit until I stumbled upon this amazing exhibit: Design and the Elastic Mind.  All about the intersections of design, nature, new technologies, and society.  Well worth checking out if you’re there before May 12, and even the online exhibition is pretty cool.  I was sad Mr. Sunshine was not there because this was the sort of art exhibit even he’d like, tech-nrrd that he is. 

Other highlights–giant playground at Liberty State Park in NJ with my nephew, a lovely dinner by myself in the Koreatown district, and just some strolling around taking in the sights.  Not a particularly eventful trip, but oh there have been some….

TO BE CONTINUED

Tagged by euphrosyne for this meme.

1. I can’t believe I’ve never been to Europe.  Or have any idea when I ever will.

2. Every time I think about the Prince of Darkness I still cringe.  And Euphrosyne cringes for me.  :-)

3. I wish I’d learned to fly when I had the chance. I grew up flying in my dad’s Cessna and always meant to learn when I got old enough, but then I hit adolescence and had more frivolous things to do.  Now I’m probably too much of a scaredy cat, and don’t have access to a free plane.

4. I have never felt so out of place as living in Orem, Utah.

5. Trashy audiobooks are my guiltiest pleasure.   They’re trashy!  And you don’t even have to use your eyes!  And you can knit/drive/do housework/wait in line at the post office/play mindless computer solitaire games (my other guilty pleasure) simultaneously!  Nothing like multitasking your guilty pleasures…

6. I hope my mom knows how grateful I am for the constant support and endless free babysitting.

7. In my darkest hours, I secretly blame myself for my dysfunction. In my brighter moments, I blame everybody and everything else.  :-D

8.  Motherhood changed my life forever.  I know it sounds cliched, but there really is nothing else like it.

I tag  Shana.  I think everybody else I know already got tagged!

On my academic grrl discussion thread a few days ago, somebody asked, “What would you want to do if you weren’t an academic?”  This is a tough one for me, since the possibility of having to find another job if the tenure stuff doesn’t work out is still looming, and the prospect of searching for another job and moving away from a place I otherwise really like is not very appealing.  And my existing experience and skill set mostly prepares me for, well, academia.  Some kind of teaching or writing, although right now the writing part is what I hate the most.  My most serious alternative job plan in college was becoming a librarian.  Wow, I am so broad-ranging.

But if we want to go into the realm of total fantasy, if-I-could-do-it-all-over-again,

1. I was somewhat burning with regret while listening to an NPR story yesterday about the booming job market for geologists.  As in, kids with bachelor’s degrees getting offers of $80k with signing bonuses, etc.  When I’m feeling really pissy about my relatively meager salary (let’s just say, if I stayed in my current job, got tenure and promoted to full professor, I might be making $80k by the time I retire, but it’ll be worth a lot less then).  And in college, I took all my science credits in geology and loved it and did really well in it.  I even briefly toyed with the idea of switching majors, but by that point, it would have meant at least another year added on to my graduation (although on the other side of 7 years of grad school, that seems relatively minor!), mostly because I weaseled out of physics and chemistry in high school and thus entered college woefully unprepared for even intro courses in those fields.  Plus they sounded boring.  But geology itself was fascinating.
2. But really, lately I’ve been really wishing I could do something more tangible, something that results in stuff you can look at and touch and kick with your foot and say “ow.”  I’m the household handy person, and really quite good at figuring out minor repairs and carpentry and mechanical stuff, and if I had any training beyond my dad occasionally showing me stuff I might be really good at it.  I’m actually pretty good with all the spatial relations and logic and stuff, and might have made a decent architect–well, maybe more of a structural engineer since I’m not particularly creative and can’t draw worth beans.  But I’m good with the analytic part, with figuring out how stuff goes together and even get a little obsessive about doing things really efficiently.  I’m kind of fascinated by green building and think that would be really cool to do.  And would also pay more than my current field.
3. I’ve also long fantasized about becoming a National Park Ranger.  Probably because I read too many Nevada Barr mysteries, but still, that would be really cool.  Especially the historical/interpretive kind of stuff.  Like teaching, but with hiking and no grading.  Now that would be a way to guarantee making way less money than I ever could as an academic. 
4. And, you know, being a CSI would be pretty cool.  If it was actually as interesting as it is on TV.  Which I know it isn’t.

Oh, well, back to grading papers…

What’s your fantasy career?

It has been a long cold lonely winter–well, metaphorically, anyway–probably the longest if not the deepest slump I’ve been through in a long long time.  For the past few months I’ve been kidding myself that being moderately functional, after the pit of despond that was the months before that, meant being okay.  Wondering if I’d just been dreaming that I’d ever felt any better than just moderately functional.

And last night I woke up, thinking back over the past week or so, and the weeks and months to come, and realized: hey, it’s me.  I’m back. 

I feel normal.  Hopeful.  Like maybe I can handle whatever comes my way.

Not sure exactly why it’s happening now–the external facts of my life are largely unchanged from what they were when I felt like hell.  Pharmaceuticals are unchanged from what they’ve been for the past few months of bare functionality.  But it’s like I’m looking at it all through a different filter. 

Admittedly, it has been a good week–I’ve been on Spring Break from teaching, so spending lots of quality time with my Little Sunshine, who’s also on Spring Break,

and working during my 3 hours per day of babysitting time on a new project that is currently much more engaging than the old, still unfinished, and still beastly Beast.  And, okay, I did get a tiny nibble at the Beast from a publisher–still far from being a real thing, but even a teensy bit of affirmation helps.  I’ve felt like my teaching is going better this semester, but then again my students from last semester seemed to think everything was hunky dory, according to their evaluations, when I was convinced these were the suckiest classes ever and I the worst professor.  Again, it seems like it’s less what’s happening out there than my view of it.

Maybe it’s the coming of spring, although spring has really been here for a while and winters are never really particularly cold or grim here at all.  And I must admit that historically–though not consistently–the worst of my depressions have almost always started in the fall and lifted in the spring, even though I’ve always lived in pretty sunny climates.  Anyway, now I can sleep with the windows open, and the wildflowers are running riot in my front yard.   

Even the prospect of yanking all that stuff out between the time the flowers die and the time my homeowner’s association gets medieval on my ass (3-4 days, if I’m really lucky)seems like something to look forward to.

Wow.  Looking forward.

Even my little corner of the blogosphere seems to be blooming with a bit more activity of late.  And playing games.  And more games.  Guess it’s time to join them again.

Hope springs.

Pollyanna bounces back.

I guess there really is always something to be glad about.  I’d forgotten.

Last night, a rare date night with Mr. Sunshine, planned by me in honor of our anniversary, to see a revival of Rock ‘n Roll High School, complete with a Ramones cover band and a very eclectic crowd ranging from teen punks to middle-aged nrrds like us.  Good stuff. 

Of course, in 1979, I was actually in elementary school and my eclectic musical tastes included Kenny Rogers and the Sugarhill Gang, but I had never even heard of the Ramones.  But hey (or, rather, gabba gabba hey), a grrl can dream, can’t she?

If you have not seen this movie, it is camp-tabulous, complete with dominatrix-y principal, nerdy teacher who discovers his inner rocker, the most pimped-out van you have ever seen, unbelievably hilarious 1979 hair and fashions (particularly those flaunted by the star, Riff Randall–can you say satin warm-up pants?), and a giant mouse whose mom wears an apron that says “I Hate Mouse Keeping,” and a nrrd grrl who saves the day by blowing up the school.  And if that is not enough for you, it’s just jampacked with Ramones songs and concert scenes.  How can you go wrong with this combo?

Well, actually, there was one problem, which was that the projectionist was totally screwing up the masking so that everyone’s heads were cut off.  Fortunately, Polly has spent the last decade and a half moonlighting as the Projection Bitch–informing a shocking number of clueless theater employees about bad focus, incorrect masking, bizarre sound problems, and occasionally even skipped reels.  This time, the theater manager was actually standing in the back of the theater, looking at the screen saying, “Is there a problem?”  Um, yeah, dude.  Even in campy ’70s movies, people are supposed to have heads.

But it was semi-corrected and we were able to see the bad ’70s hairstyles in all their glory.

Hey ho let’s go!