Not Laboring on Labor Day

Right now I'm sitting at the coffee shop with Herpreet. She's working on her laptop, and I'm working on mine. I'm not sure what she's listening to. I'm listening to Grease 2. It's not a bad way to spend part of a Labor Day afternoon.

My boyfriend is a deep thinker and has been having especially deep thoughts lately in the wake of his plunge into academia. Last week, I was only sort of awake when he started to intelligently explain Barack Obama's appearance on The Daily Show, and I actually interrupted him to say, "Yeah, that's sort of like Danny Tidwell on So You Think You Can Dance." Showing how nice he is, he nodded as if that were a totally apt and legit comparison.

I've found myself more than once recently talking about Wil Wheaton. "Well, Wil Wheaton says..." and he finally asked me, "Who is Wil Wheaton?" And I walked into my bedroom and walked out with the framed showcard I bought off of eBay with a framed picture. It's a piece of one of those big cardboard displays in the movie theater, the image of John Cusack and Wil Wheaton sitting on a bed in one of the flashbacks in Stand By Me. I pointed to him, "That's Wil Wheaton. Now he has a blog." And I really do enjoy it. It's weird sometimes to realize that the little boy who played Gordie LaChance, one of the characters that pretty much consumed my entire psyche throughout the entirety of sixth grade and who grew up to be a writer, is now a grown man and a writer. But he's a good writer and seems like a genuinely nice person, and there's something that feels right to me, in a corny way, about that.

Speaking of blogs, there have been two blogs I've been keeping up with this year that have moved me down to the depths of my being. This one chronicles a family's battle with lymphoma. Even though I don't know these people at all, I followed it so closely, hoping and praying for a good outcome and healing beyond the heartbreak they suffered. To read about them coming back into the light has been nothing short of inspiring. The writing on this site is some of the best I've ever encountered on the web. This one also has incredibly beautiful writing and tells the story of the birth of two babies and the survival of only one. It is hard to know how to describe these blogs because they involve struggles and heartbreaks of a degree I've never experienced and can't even imagine and I don't want to come off like a dork talking about how beautiful they are and how much they've moved me. I just am grateful to have been able to read them, really, and to have witnessed from a million miles away the beauty and the strength they have been able to express. I don't even know.

I watched The Pianist recently for the first time. It certainly was harrowing. Worth watching for this scene alone. {Warning: Huge spoiler in that link.}

Meanwhile, I have finally started The Road. I haven't gotten far, but I know I want to keep going. I just finished Daniel Isn't Talking by Marti Leimbach, which I thought was pretty excellent.

This week I've been spending a lot of time with my sister, which has been great. She came to exercise class with me and marveled at my ability to roll around in other people's sweat. She was proud of me. "It's definitely good germophobic therapy," I said. Class continues to be hard but fun. Sometimes I'm so tired during the cooldown that I almost fall over during the stretches. The other night a panting man saw me about to keel over and then right myself and he nodded in agreement. "Talk about spent," he said. I nodded back. Spent indeed. My sister and I went to Piccadilly for lunch, site of many childhood family meals. I ordered a side of orange macaroni and cheese and a side of orange baby carrots for my lunch and decided to drink some orange Fanta with my meal. The three went well together. It is impossible to quantify how much Piccadilly macaroni and cheese we consumed as kids. Back when they had the really delicious red punch, not the Hi-C fruit punch. Good times.

We had a party with all of her lifelong friends the other night before sending her off to South America, and we ate jambalaya and shrimp and brownies and it felt good to be in my parents' house with all of those old friends and their babies. So many babies! Wow.

Yesterday my boyfriend and I went to New Orleans together for the first time since he's moved here. We ate at our favorite brunch place -- he got debris and poached eggs and I got a bacon, arugula, tomato, and egg sandwich on focaccia. Later, we stopped for gelato (strawberry and chocolate hazelnut). Because it's so long, we've been watching The Lives of Others in installments. I thought the first 15 minutes or so were sort of boring, but now I'm hooked.

What else? I'm liking my classes so far. The material is alternatingly mindnumblingly boring and very interesting. I guess all of grad school might like that, no matter what you're studying.

Jessamyn and Grace have been schooling me a little bit on the ways of the Canon Digital Rebel. I borrowed B.'s and tried to do a little shooting with it. My main goal was to be able to shoot at my sister's party indoors without using the pop-up flash that comes with the camera. It was not a completely successful mission, but I learned a bit about apertures, shutter speed, and ISO and just knowing a little tiny bit makes me want to know a lot more. Mostly I just want to be as good a photographer as those two ladies even though that will likely not happen in this lifetime. Here are a few shots that I like even though they're nothing sensationally arty.