I missed it yesterday because we were busy running around, having lunch with Saugata, and coming home to see Andrew, but yesterday, March 21st was SANTANA’S BIRTHDAY!!!
She is such a party puppy!!
Out of curiosity, we researched Freckles’s birthday…approximately October 13, 1994…She will be 14 this year!!! So old!!
Also, Happy Birthday to Dori, whose birthday is the same as Santana!!! Yay!!
I’m a huge fan of maps. When I was driving between NY and KY at least four times a year, my atlas had four pages completely marked up, folded over, and half-falling out of the book (NY, KY, PA, OH). I get anxious when I realize I’m lost, but then I LOVE finding my way back with the help of a good map. I like to highlight the roads I’ve taken and time the trip along a new route against the original.
Online, I’m the same…Google Maps, Live Maps, MapQuest, whatever…if I see an address, I’ll usually map it. Then I end up playing around on the map for half an hour until I’m half a state away and switching between aerial, hybrid, road, 2D, 3D…whichever options they have.
Anyway, the point is, I found this today (from the pretty great site These Today which gives you 5 sites daily, ranging from high to low brow) and it’s pretty wonderful and fun. Strange Maps is a blog-type site of random maps (from star maps, to historical maps, music-related maps, food maps, it goes on and on). This is surely going to be a complete distraction this weekend while I am supposed to be writing a paper.
I think this site really explores what is so awesome about maps…you can use them to find your way, to locate where you are, the typical ideas of what goes along with reading a map…but you can also use them to organize some random facts, info, abstract ideas, etc. into a form that is more appealing and understandable by people (esp. students) who are visual learners. This idea is pretty common, and you see it with nearly every teacher who presents graphs, typical statistical maps, and other visual tools along with their lessons. However, I think that taking things you wouldn’t necessarily consider ‘facts’ or useful info in other senses (for example, the area codes where Luda claims to have ‘ladies’ waiting for him) and reshaping them involves a certain amount of interaction with the ‘facts’ that makes you think about things in a different way, raise questions that wouldn’t have been brought up otherwise, and maybe even find some new understanding of whatever info you are dealing with and the context in which that info exists. Luda’s lady-friends’ area codes may seem irrelevant, unbelievably ridiculous and not worthy of a song (let alone a map), and looking at the ’stats’ on the map and the conclusions Stefanie Gray makes about them doesn’t reveal any giant life-altering insight, but it does show how organizing, considering and sharing this irrelevant info in a new shape can bring out questions of authorship, cultural belonging, popular reception of music based on personal connection to something within a song, the limited scope of celebrity connection to the worlds of their audience, and levels on which music can be appreciated beyond the initial response ("I’m a female and a feminist. I dislike the word ‘ho’. However, as a geography major, I find this song hilarious, and had to map it.")
Anyway, beyond Ludacris and the various area codes he enjoys visiting, maps are awesome, this blog is spectacular, and if you need me in the next few days, I will be exploring Strange Maps.
A lot of things have changed for this semester (my CDC ‘internship’, less Scholars meetings, classes only TR, job search, apartment packing), and I’m still adjusting to things that changed last semester (the gym routine, free weekends, no Matt, no Hicania in my office). So, I realized that I need some new routines.
1-Job search, Chai tea, & This American Life. Andrea introduced me to Chai tea which not only makes me feel sophisticated and fancy, but gives me a reason to use my wide variety of mugs, AND is delicious. Tonight I drank tea, caught up on like 3 episodes of TAL, and browsed new job posting on about 80 web sites. I am ridiculously relaxed and excited at the same time…there are finally jobs I’m interested in/possibly qualified for, and unlike every other time I’ve looked at listings, I’m not ready to curl up in the corner and sob about it. Is it the tea? Is it the NPR? Is it the fact that I had CDC training today and feel like I’m actually on the way to doing some active job searching? WHO KNOWS. But any way, chai is delicious, superintendents are nuts (TAL #346), and Santana is being sweet and cuddly like you’d never imagine.
On that note:
2-Blogging about the adorableness of my baby puppy. (More writing in general).
Gorgeous, right? Andrew brought his digital camera home from school and after I got back from Queens with Matt, my adorable little brother presented me with a series of absolutely wonderful photos of Santana. I think this one looks like a professional portrait or something. I have no idea how he got her to cooperate and sit still for so long. I usually get a camera full of puppy nose when I try. I might be turning into one of those grossly in love puppy-moms…Matt and I started a puppy baby book for Santana last week. I took her to a groomer (just for a bath and nail trimming!) and she got her scraggly fur trimmed (I will admit, that made me a little sad…I love that she’s a scruffy pup) and a girly, flowered bandana, which I have left on for the past three days. She might be completely spoiled…but she makes me feel better and smile even when I am feeling depressed, sick, lonely, whatever. She is the sweetest, cuddliest puppy ever and just loves to play, be close, and pay attention to every move you make. It is one of the best gifts I’ve ever gotten (UK graduation gift from Veronica) and right up there with the important parts of my life. She loves Matt, Matt loves her, she loves bacon, I love bacon, she loves running around in giant circles, Freckles loves slowly following her around. Done and done.
3-Monday Date Nite. My partner GA last year was one of about…oh, maybe…five reasons I didn’t have a complete meltdown during my job between August 06 and May 07. I was really afraid we wouldn’t see much of each other after we stopped working together…NOT SO. We managed to have mostly weekly date nights on Tuesdays last semester that got slightly more sporadic later in the semester. This semester we’re going with Mondays for early dinner, late movie. The bonus is that she’s got class in the UDC between dinner and the movie, so I’m going to set that time aside for me to sit in the computer lab down there and get definite work done every week. I think this will be super helpful and give me some regular scheduling where so much of the rest of my stuff this semester is super flexible and doesn’t commit me to specific hours for most of the time.
4-Craftiness! A while ago, my aunt (ex-aunt-in-law?) bought me some scrapbooking stuff as a gift, and I have since been mildly interested in it. Then this past October, Marinda invited me to a "Stampin’ Up!" party and I was completely hooked. I am trying hard not to spend lots of money on it, because it can get expensive, but every once in a while I treat myself to a mini-splurge. And during weeks when I’m particularly stressed, but not necessarily overly busy, I force myself to set aside an hour on a night in the middle of the week and stamp for a bit — it is SO relaxing for me, and then I get to have some concrete result of the relaxation. I think it overall has a great effect on me, so I am going to make it a part of my weekly routine this semester to keep me on track and in the not-flipping-out range of existence. Andrea and Kelly also taught me how to knit (well, almost), and that requires more patience to get something close to a feasible result, but it is still relaxing, and can be done with slightly less-focused concentration. So, YAY! Plus, it all gives me an excuse to sit with some girls and relax and catch up.
5-Puppy walks. Yeah yeah, back to the puppy. On top of a more regular gym routine, as the weather warms up, I want to get back into the habit of long walks to Rec. Park with Santana. She loves the walk and the park, and I love to watch her explore and then get tired of walking and try to pull me up random steps into strangers’ houses to go home. Really, the reason for wanting exercise in my routine is self-explanatory, but the need for adorable puppy fun is less obvious if you aren’t turning into a crazy dog lady like I am. 
6-Reading for fun. My two class (Modernism something or other & Masterpieces of the Novel) are a mix of books that look wonderful, and books I will trudge through. I read a bunch of wonderful stuff since last semester, and my list of books to read keeps growing. So, even if it’s slow, I’m going to build in time for reading non-school books. Next on my list:
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Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk |
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The Tenth Circle: A Novel by Jodi Picoult |
So, I fussed about my blog, Matt was most likely annoyed, I fussed some more, he had me download Windows Live Writer, which I realized is about 9 zillion times better than what I was doing after about 10 seconds of using it. Then he showed me all the plug-ins…most are very web-y and not useful to my specifically very pink blog, but I found some fun ones…LET’S TAKE A LOOK!
1) Book details…lots of times I want to link to amazon or another site when I’m writing about a book…NOW, when I want to write about a book like, for example, Wicked, I can just pop this in my blog:
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Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (Harper Fiction) by Gregory Maguire |
2) Quotations… I click this plug-in and it gives me a giant list of quotes to choose from… that is just plain fun. deal.
Quote of the day:
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure. - Samuel Johnson
3) Polaroid…I love putting in pictures….with PLUG-INS now I can look cool. Haha, let’s take this opportunity to look at some new adorable pictures of the puppy (more to come).
So, mostly everyone I’ve talked to about this recipe eventually responds with something along the lines of, "yeah, well, cream and bacon will make anything delicious." Probably fairly true…I am a huge fan of bacon. I really align myself with Homer on this one…Simpson that is…the pig is indeed a "wonderful, magical animal."
That being said, I was really surprised at how wonderful this dish turned out. (I had this dish at a dinner party a little over a year ago, and this was my attempt to replicate it without a specific recipe)
Brussels sprouts are a type of cabbage, which I’m usually not a fan of unless it’s in a really well-made coleslaw. When we bought the pack of B.sprouts at Pike Place, I remembered my mom always being crazy about them, and I remembered that I was generally fairly disgusted by them. I also remembered that I think that disgust was based on smell, cooking method (steamed until super soft), and general childhood fussiness. However, I also remembered that a year ago, I was shocked by how much I loved the dish that Stacey had made for our group dinner.
So, I searched the internet for a recipe…and couldn’t find one. I could find recipes that incorporated one or another part of what I remembered, but couldn’t find the whole thing. So, with a few recipes in the back of my mind, I sort of just made it work. I was scared….it was worth it. It was a delicious side dish (I served it with Sole, aromatic veggies, and orzo, but it would have worked better with a stronger main dish…beef, chicken, pork, even a salmon or something). Sure, it’s not exactly healthy, but B.sprouts are full of nutrients (the darker, more colorful a vegetable, the more nutritious it is), and this is a great way to introduce them into your diet. Just make sure the rest of your meal isn’t full of bacon and cream, and you’ll be fine.
I wrote a good portion of this between 6 and 7am in the Newark airport after a red-eye from Seattle…I’m sorry for any completely non-sensical points.
I just finished reading Wicked by Gregory Maguire. It’s the basis for the popular Broadway musical, but apparently the musical is wildly different from the book. I’d recommend the book to anyone…it is fun, serious, thoughtful, and really well written, in my opinion.
Anyway, as I was reading, I got thinking about several other parallel novels/prequels/re-imaginings of classics that I’ve read… I tend to love them. In the same way that I really enjoy seeing movie adaptations of books I like, even if the movie is horribly unsatisfying (Eragon and The Golden Compass are the two recent examples), and especially if it is satisfying and wonderful (it will be a sad day when there are no more Harry Potter movies on the way). The earliest of these types of books that I ever encountered was “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs” by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith, told by the Big Bad Wolf. My aunt read this to me when I was younger (it was originally released in 1989, according to Wikipedia), and I completely fell in love with it. This particular aunt is responsible for my love of Disney and for introducing me to Jodi Picoult.
The other examples I can think of off the top of my head are Gertrude and Claudius by Updike, which is a “prequel” of sorts of Hamlet, and does a wonderful job of presenting the love between Gertrude and Claudius, and turning my favorite Shakespearean hero into something completely different. Updike didn’t just pull from Shakespeare, but also used a few other historical sources, so it isn’t completely a revision or a parallel in the way that Wicked is.
Wide Sargasso Sea is more truly a prequel and parallel novel to Jane Eyre, another of my favorite works. Drawing on the mad woman in the attic from Bronte’s original, Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, presents Bertha Mason’s past in the Caribbean. What Wide Sargasso Sea achieves most blatantly of these examples is to take a classic work from a much earlier era, and transforms its story and characters in such a way that it becomes a popular text in a new theoretical discourse…in this case, the postcolonial theory that deals with race, identity, movement, assimilation, etc. All issues that are not strongly developed or considered in Victorian literature.
All of these examples, to varying degrees, give the reader opportunities for more direct reflection than reading either the original or the parallel on its own. Wicked, pulling not just from a novel, but from a wildly well-known film, does this constantly; “One never learns how the witch became wicked, or whether that was the right choice for her–is it ever the right choice? Does the devil ever struggle to be good again, or if so is he not a devil? It is at the very least a question of definitions” (231). This portion of text is speaking directly about the Kumbric Witch, a legend within the story that is completely intertwined with the roots of Oz. However, taken separately, in the context of the original Wizard of Oz, the quotation very clearly brings the reader to Elphaeba, the main character of Wicked and her future role as the ‘Wicked Witch of the West.’ At this point in the novel, the reader is meant to be at least partially sympathetic with the green-skinned Elphie and so tied to her story that this reflection on the definition, intention, and meaning of the witch and wickedness serves to remind where her life is headed, according to the original story we are so familiar with.
One of my original questions/considerations while I was reading Wicked was how necessary a reading/viewing/understanding of the original is to a really satisfying reception of the parallel. But the more I think about it, the more I think popular and really successful parallels are going to be pulled from already widely popular, possibly canonical works…works that the target audience will at least be able to recognize, with most readers quite familiar with the original. I’m sure there are parallel novels directed towards very specific target groups, drawing on the niche market of the original to draw a smaller, but highly loyal group of readers.
As a reader familiar with the original, there is a tendency to draw comparison, to see how the parallel leaves out or changes things from the original. Further, in the case of Wicked, a parallel of a work that was both a text and a film, which original is Maguire working from? I have never read the Wizard of Oz, but this makes me want to…my urge is to find all the ways that Wicked speaks to the book that may be irrelevant to the film. Now that I know the classic story from a second perspective, I want the third pretty badly, especially since the third, Baum’s novel, is the true ‘original’.
One of the things I thought Wicked did really wonderfully was to put both itself and the original in a frame of historical variation, allowing the reader to question a little bit of everything that is going on. Towards the very end of Wicked, where you might be expecting the ‘happily ever after’ summary: “It may merely be apocryphal that when the Wizard saw the glass bottle he gasped, and clutched his heart. The story is told in so many ways, depending on who is doing the telling, and what needs to be heard at the time. It is a matter of history, however…” (406). Again, the text speaks directly to a legend within the novel, while directing the reader’s attention back to the original. This time, we see Wicked’s perspective; The Wizard of Oz is a part of the apocrypha surrounding this period in history, and Wicked is presenting the true, untainted perspective we have missed out on. There is a great possibility that such a tone could be read as disloyal to a classic original, brushing a long-standing masterpiece off as myth and legend within the ‘truth’ of this new, parallel narrative. However, if these arguments come up, it’s important to remember that the worlds of fiction (especially a world like Oz), are mythological from the start, and in the same way that allusions to classical mythology work endlessly throughout literature, The Wizard of Oz is upheld by Wicked, it’s relevance, importance, and the fact that it is completely embedded in our cultural mind are all honored and emphasized by the fact that Maguire was so powerfully inspired by the original. Works that do not inspire and touch their readers (or viewers, in some cases) do not yield parallels, prequels, re-imaginings, remakes, whatever. The presence of such parallels or revisions, even if the new work is not as successful as I believe Wicked to be, proves the importance of the original. Even as years pass, we continue to think about the works that are most important to us. Provoked by powerful literature and other media, writers pull from these strong cultural pools of shared knowledge, worlds, and characters, creating not only a new perspective on a beloved narrative, but also placing a distance between the original and the parallel. This distance doesn’t push the original away to make room for the ‘truth’ of the newer narrative, but instead allows for a new view of the original in light of its receptions, development, historical and timeless relevance, and its relationship to the deep, general themes that tie it so strongly to readers.
Send her some hand-made comics…
…she will love them