Category: categories

What Year is it Again?

An all-too-familiar excerpt from Here Comes the Guide Companion magazine Spring 2003:

“Don’t forget: That man in the corner is your fiance. While you may have intended to plan the entire wedding yourself, consider including him in the process. Because he loves you, he’ll tag along with you to the florist, caterer, photographer and wedding planner. And because he loves you, he’ll forgive you for saying stream-of-consciousness things like, “Oh honey don’t you just love this it’s so adorable how does it look on me oooh I just have to have it!” Even though he probably won’t share your boundless enthusiasm for picking out party favors or linens, he’ll do what he can–chauffer you around and say “uh-huh” a lot, despite the fact that he really doesn’t understand much of what’s going on.”

Dear anonymous author,

Bite me.

Sincerely,

Maggie Berry

Breathing Room

My favorite part of a Vogue article by Katrina Heron, former editor-in-chief of Wired magazine. She quit her hectic job to be a better mom and find a more varied life:

“The joys of a carefree life eluded me. I’d sit down with a book and not be able to read it. I was distracted, all peripheral vision. I felt I should be accomplishing something.

Thank God for kids, who really do teach us to delight in slow pleasures. We would dawdle over breakfast, talking about how much we liked raisins.”

Lance Makes Me Laugh

Lance’s new site gives his take on San Francisco’s real summer:

“Thing is, in December? It’s totally lovely here. In December it’s 70 degrees, the skies are blue, the dogs are running around like chickens, the chickens are running around like chickens and all is right with the world of dogs and chickens. Me, I moved here in December, 1999 from Boston and in Boston in December the chickens are frozen solid and they hurt when people throw them at you…”

Heavenly

You finished that project two days early, and you climb in your big blue jeep to drive home on County Road 120. The house is spotless, and there’s leftover pizza in the fridge. You kick off your shoes and take your pizza out back to check the garden. The seeds you planted have just started to send up shoots, and when you look down at the dirt pushing up between your toes, you remember that you painted your toenails red last night. You go inside for a bath, get dressed up, and head out dancing. You wake up sore the next morning.

Please go read Leslie Harpold’s, “Possible Scenarios for Heaven”. She’s got a pretty brain, that girl.

Light Travel Reading

My girlfriend is looking for a book about marriage, and we find it in the bookstore’s relationship section. It’s nestled amongst several other titles that make us uncomfortable to be seen browsing:

Me: I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me!

L: The Stop Walking on Eggshells Workbook: Practical Strategies for Living With Someone Who Has Borderline Personality Disorder.

Me: How awesome would it be to buy Why Men Don’t Listen for the plane ride, and then just bust it out after we’ve buckled up?

L: That’s perfect. He looks over and you’re reading The Angry Heart and, like, wiping a single tear from your cheek.

Me: It’s almost worth the twenty bucks just to see the look on his face.

Later, in a Barnes and Noble in Delaware, I hone in on the perfect shock-inducing travel reading in the wedding section, There Goes the Bride: Making up your mind, calling it off, and moving on. I find this endlessly amusing. Bryan does not concur.

First, the Good News

A 54-year-old woman who works four jobs, recently won $76 million in the lottery. She didn’t tell her bosses at first, because she’d just requested more hours and felt obligated to work them for awhile.

A gardener found $1,700 under a bush while he was working and actually turned it in to the police. It belonged to a woman who had been saving a dollar a day for a trip to Universal Studios with her son, and had also been holding on to her father’s savings from his Social Security so he could afford a car.

A Bellevue couple chopped up twenty-six trees on a public trail in an attempt to improve the view from their “hillside home.” They were caught in the act, and now they’ll be paying the city $150,000, publicly apologizing, and doing some community service time.

( All via Romenesko’s Obscure Store and Reading Room.)