I was sitting here on my couch just now, trying to vanquish writer's block through that ancient and time-tested method of staring at the blank computer screen and wondering idly whether Alec Baldwin thinks it's as funny as I do that his girlfriend's name is Hilaria, when my gaze wandered over to the bookshelf and I saw my passport up there on the highest shelf.
"It's surprising how much memory is built around things unnoticed at the time."
-- Barbara Kingsolver
So I thought I should probably pop in and say that no, I'm not dead, I've just been in London.
I got a wild hair this weekend—haha, see what I did there?—and chopped nine inches of tangles into a chin-length bob, which was sort of a ballsy move for me, considering I'd been growing my hair for the last two and a half years, but I got the idea into my head and I couldn't get it out, and so that's how it went.
1. Eaten baked potato pizza. It tasted like it would taste if a person carrying a platter of potato skins collided with a person carrying a pizza, and calamity ensued in such a way that the potato skins ended up on top of the pizza and everyone ate them anyway. Slathered in sour cream, brought in a little plastic container for this express purpose.
2. Accidentally called the skybridges that connect most of downtown Minneapolis "sky malls."
I have some things that I would like to discuss. The first is that Jared Leto is currently at my office and I am not. Trust me, I'm not even sure how this actually happened—how he came to be at my office, I mean, not why I'm not there; I know why I'm not there and it's because it's after 8 o'clock at night—but I have deduced, through a flurry of tweets and Facebook messages, that this is indeed where he is. What's he doing there? Eh, probably just wearing a jacket with a sheepskin collar and leaning against things, I guess. Does my office have a boiler room?
You may remember that Sean wrapped up a tire for my birthday a few months ago with the promise to build me a tire swing. And it turns out he's a man who's true to his word!
Go on, add your swingers joke right here. Just try not to.
Oh god, I've become the sort of person who gives her blog posts titles from TS Eliot poems, have I? Apparently I have. I do apologize, but every time I've had to lie on one of those crinkly paper-covered chairs in a doctor's office, that line from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has popped, unbidden, into my head. Blame the in-depth critical analysis of it I had to write for a foppish professor in 1999, if you must, but don't blame me.
We are currently in the middle of a bathroom renovation, as you may have guessed from the title of this post, which for some reason I saw fit to write as though I was rapping it (there are just so many good words that rhyme with renovation!)
I am recapping, excruciatingly slowly, the two-week trip we took to South Africa last year.Here is part one, about our layover in Paris; here is part two, about Cape Town; here is part three, about Cape Point and the penguins of Boulders Beach; here is part four, about wine tasting and stroking a baby cheetah in Stellenbosch; and here is part five about shark-diving in Gansbaai. Expect me to be finished with this sometime in 2014.
