November 2011
44 posts
“Beautiful young people are accidents of nature but beautiful old people are...”
– Eleanor Roosevelt
I made a goodreads account!
(Foreign) Word of the Day:
Etxarte
is a Basque surname, one part of the double surnames with Basque in south Spain.
etxe “house” + arte “between” = house between.
Like an in-between home, a home away from home.
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(Foreign) Word of the Day:
hwyl (Welsh)
n. emotional state capable of arousing intense eloquence
a complex and intangible quality of passion and sense of belonging that isn’t easy to translate but which has been said to sum up Welshness in a word
ex. Will was certainly an eloquent preacher, if not a born orator, and possessed that peculiar gift known in Wales as “hwyl” — a sudden ecstatic inspiration, which carries the...
Black Friday
marks the beginning of the Christmas season. Traditionally, the day after Thanksgiving (which takes place the fourth Thursday of November), many retail businesses will open their stores early to put out promotional sales and kick off the holiday shopping season.
The name originates from Philadelphia. The “black” of Black Friday comes from accounting. In accounting, negative income is...
My town:
DID YOU KNOW…
The Crescenta-Canada Valley once boasted the healthiest air quality in the world?
The first settler here chopped down the valley’s only old growth forest?
The Verdugo Hills Golf Course was once the site of a Japanese Internment camp?
La Crescenta’s founder also pioneered California’s fruit industry?
The streets of Flintridge were originally horse trails...
“She tells me she wants to be a raindrop. She doesn’t mind falling as long as...”
– When Five Fell
“There are times in life when you’ll be tossed in the well, too, with...”
– Neil Pasricha, The 3 A’s of awesome
“I wonder if Beethoven held his breath the first time his fingers touched the...”
– Andrea Gibson
“Butterflies are God’s proof that we can have a second chance at life.”
– Alexandra Udinov
One More Shot
The Great Recession has led many young adults to move back in with their parents. But for actress-comedian Kat Ahn, it was her parents who moved in with her. And that was just the beginning.
story by Kat Ahn photographs by Luke Inki Cho
THE CALL.
“Kat … Mom and Dad are coming to L.A.,” my brother tells me in an angrier-than-normal tone. “For how long?” I ask, thinking they’re coming for a...
“Growing up is hard on a friendship. There’s no revelation in that. I remember my...”
– Ann Brashares, Sisterhood Everlasting
You’ve got magic inside your...
Random thoughts:
I started watching Parks and Recreation. Amy Poehler’s character, Leslie Knope, reminds me of Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott from the Office. Is this just me?
Studying is difficult when I’m drowning in my own inadequacy.
Watching unedited Holocaust clips of mass grave burials in the Warsaw ghettos was thoroughly traumatizing.
The Hunger Games. The series didn’t get any...
Glee - Rumor Has It/Someone Like You
Aubergine (French)
Aubergine n. adj.
eggplant.
Conor used it to describe the color of my hat.
It’s killing me that I can’t drop my life, leave work, not go to class to sit and finish this book. It’s not the writing (definitely not the writing) that is enchanting but the plot, the idea. It’s as though George Orwell’s 1984 and Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy had a child. A very distopian future driven by tournament games. If you have read the last book...
She loves her momma’s lemonade Hates the...
I’m in this Colbie Caillat phase. I mean, I...
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“Anne Sexton sometimes seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so...”
– Erica Jong, about Anne Sexton
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“You shall be my roots and
I will be your shade,
though the sun burns my...”
– Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
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“But we knew the name of the man that live there or had lived there at one time...”
– Alice Munro, The New Yorker
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“He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is...”
– (Bowles 1949, 6)
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Discussing Death Cab for Cutie's I will follow you...
Molly: It's a really sweet lyric: "I will follow you into the dark."
Me: That's creepy in any other context. It should be "I will follow you into the light."
Molly: (blank stare)
Me: You know, 'cause of the light at the end of the tunnel...
Molly: Why are you in a tunnel?
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There's this series I grew up with.
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. There’s a movie about it, I hear, with quite a cast that still managed to produce a somewhat accurate but diluted version of the coming-to-age series.
It’s a four-book series with four main characters, teenage girls in high school, and a pair of pants that travel between them as a sort of ritual to keep their...
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“Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved...”
– Charles Dickens, Great Expectations 