Breakfast at DK Diner and Read This Book

The next morning we awoke in varying stages of a hangover, which we decided to overcome through breakfast at DK Diner. So we got ourselves mobile, picked up K.'s friend A., and got down to the business at hand. DK Diner is a pretty small space with about maybe eight or so booths, chairs along the windows and three or so tables. It's a 'pick your own mug and get your own coffee place,' which I generally enjoy though it seems to be so popular that you inevitably seem to have to step over babies in carrying cases and avoid rogue toddlers to get from your seat to the coffee. It seems that the spot used to be only about donuts, but that over time and a switch in owners, it's now a go-to breakfast/lunch spot as well as donut mecca.
I was torn between going my usual breakfast route of two eggs and sausage links and branching out to one of DK's more esoteric combinations of pretty much the same thing. In the end I chose the path of gluttony and ordered the DK Skillet, which was an open faced omelet piled high with potatoes, sausage and cheese, which was then covered in sausage gravy. I know, I know, the state of my arteries is nothing if not constantly on my mind. This was an ooey gooey mess, but tasty. Maybe a little heavier a meal than I really needed. The gravy was a cut above some diner gravy for sure, and the cheese was properly melty. No complaints. Everyone else's breakfast looked equally good. I'd love to go back, order a simpler breakfast and maybe a donut to boot. I think A., A. and I felt relatively revived by our meals. K. didn't fare quite as well and needed a nice nap to fully recuperate. So after breakfast we parted ways; K. going home for a nap while I zoomed off to German Village for some quality time at the Book Loft.
There are about three constant places in my memories of visiting Ohio with my mother. The first is my aunt and uncle's house, the second is the Book Loft, and then there's COSI. The Book Loft is a sprawling building chock full of books at pretty decent prices. It really is a warren with three floors worth of wares, laid out so that there are twists and turns, rooms that feel like secret finds, different music piping into to different sections and just so many books in a much homier and true atmosphere than, say, Barnes and Noble. As a kid I could literally become lost while exploring the books on puppies, bird migration, religion, celebrity, crochet, and of course fiction and military history. This trip I was generally able to navigate around in a purposeful manner, though I enjoyed getting slightly turned around when looking for the fiction section, as this made actually finding the section more of a feat of accomplishment.
At one point I was carrying around six or seven books, but in the end I curtailed my spend-money ways and chose to abandon my Jasper Fforde and Margaret Maron books in favor of buying Carry the One, by Carol Anshaw. Carol was a particularly meaningful and good professor during my time at SAIC. She was a great teacher, wonderful conversationalist and, also, by the bye, a ridiculously good writer. So I bought her book on a Friday, and in between the family meals and activities and playing with kids and dying eggs and hiding eggs, I managed to finish the book by Sunday. This is a testament to the story's ability to take hold and insist I know what happened to all the characters as soon as possible. What I'm trying to say, in other words, is to go out and buy the book.
Once my purchase was made I got back into my car and drove along one of the smaller alley/roads of the German Village area, all brick and cobbled, all bumpy and teeth rattling. It was a beautiful day. Sunny, relatively warm, flowers out. Good stuff. Then I drove home not using any freeway and saw how quickly Columbus, like most cities, can go from a rather prosperous neighborhood to a markedly not prosperous one and then back again.

Jamaica Coast in Speedy Driving Photos

K. left in the morning on Tuesday. I had to check out by noon, which cramped my style a little since I wasn't being picked up until 1:30. I am usually good at time management, but I usually overestimate on how long everything will take, which makes me conservative in my activity planning. Point being that what I really wanted to do after K. left around 10 was sunscreen myself, go to the beach and read and float, then return to the room take a shower, get jerk chicken, check out and then get the shuttle on back to Montego Bay. But I simply didn't have faith that I could get it all done, and I really needed that shower element of the plan. So in the end I walked to the beach once more and stood with my feet in the water for a few long, hot minutes. I'm sure the tourists around me found it a little peculiar. Actually, probably not. There were men in speedos. That is far more peculiar than a girl in a dress standing up to her ankles in the sea. I checked out on time but then found myself with an hour and a half to kill. I ended up just sittin along the lobby's balcony area, reading Patti's Smith's Just Kids (now that's a book that sank me into an existential crisis over my artistic lack of identity). Eventually a small van already containing a number of others from different resorts pulled up and I packed myself on. The drive was about an hour and a half, and I was relatively vigilant in taking photographs during that time. Though I couldn't quite get it together to take a good shot of GOATS.







I was quite taken with the fact that Coke in Jamaica is made with real sugar. I told K. that I thought high fructose corn syrup was the devil (mainly because Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver and news personalities have told me so) but couldn't quite explain my reasoning. This happened again with L. just last week.
Penguins!
And that, my friends, is my trip to Jamaica. I killed time in the airport by drinking two red stripes and writing. While two people did sit in my row on the plane, they quickly decamped to more roomy seats after we were in the air, which allowed me to once again sprawl myself across three seats for the majority of the flight. I also started Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. That guy. Why can't I be so clever? It would rationalize all my worst qualities if I could only write smart things about all the shit I watch. When I left Jamaica it was in the mid-80s. When I arrived in Philadelphia, it was 39 degrees. A rather abrupt return to reality, if you ask me.

I Still Read

While I would struggle to remember what the last movie I watched in a theater might be, I am an avid watcher of movies and television shows of all stripes. But at this point I have gone without a round up of movies/television shows for so long that to do so now would be really boring for all of us. (Sorry Bones, Private Practice, Modern Family, Community, Castle, Lost and a host of others). While in Nashville I found it alternatively easy and hard to read a book or watch television. Television in real time weirds me out now that I have gone completely over to the Hulu/Netflix format, so many commercials. Anyways, here are some books I have read in the last few months. Making Toast is a book written by a man whose daughter died very unexpectedly. He and his wife move their life to their son-in-law's to help with the watching over and raising of their three grandchildren. It can break your heart a little.
The Secret History. I don't know what to make of this book. While I guess it is supposed to take place in the eighties or nineties, there seem to be historical inconsistencies and all the characters and their mannerisms, along with the setting, kept making me think the book was taking place in the 1950s. I guess it's a mystery. Or something. A thriller? A novel. Eh. I read it. I didn't not like it, but I just didn't ever care about any of it really.
I think I read the lastest Margaret Maron in about 36 hours. It was fulfilling in the way her mysteries always are. It has been more than a year since I have been able to read a Margaret Maron book, as I went through a number of them while staying with T. and C. in the winter of 2008.
I bought Chelsea Handlers Collection of One-Night Stands while in Nashville. It was relatively entertaining. It made me glad that I haven't had as many sexual encounters as she has and equally self-conscious that I'm not having as much good sex as she did. Too much information? Too bad.
My parents read this book (not at the same time) and encouraged me to do the same. It was good, though I felt that it could have used its narrative framework a little bit better in the end. Sad. Russia in World War II.
I looked around the house for another book once I finished City of Thieves and picked up Sarah's Key, shrugged, and started reading it. While the beginning is a little tedious (not in terms of plot as much as the fact that everyone and their mother knows at least one parallel from the opening two chapters, so having to wait for that parallel to be revealed to the characters is a little slow going), the actual story was quite moving. France in World War II. French guilt. Jewish children and death, death, death. There was a little redemption, which kept it from just being heavy. I finished it in a day. A rainy day.
Hm. What else. The other day I learned that the red tailed skinks I have been seeing everywhere are the mature form of a blue tailed skink, also known as a five line skink. They also might be males. I don't know. I have given up photographing them. They have some sort of really annoying sixth sense about when I'm out on the rock without my camera and even when I'm sitting there with camera in hand, just waiting, they move so quickly I still can't quite get the shot. You'll just have to believe me.

Movies and Books, Oh My

I won tickets to see a sneak preview of Duplicity a few weeks back. The tickets were care of Philebrity. L. came along. This movie was like Oceans 11 only without as many funny guys. The method of story telling, of giving the viewer one set of information, then rewinding and filling them in...well, it was done one too many times for my taste. Julia Roberts and Clive Owen did good jobs of acting...Roberts is definitely older now, I was sort of surprised by how they didn't hide some of the signs of this (not that they should exactly, just that I would have expected they might). But the movie went on too long, and though the acting was good, I didn't really care about any of them. Never good.

Last night I watched What Happens In Vegas. It was entirely predictable. Cameron Diaz is buff as hell, as is Ashton Kutcher. There were a few laughs, no tears.
Terry Gross loves Richard Price, so I figured I should give one of his books a spin. It was a mystery, but not in that formulaic sense exactly...transcending that in favor of themes of redemption, or something. I need to be quiet.
This movie made me decide that Michael Cera is probably gay.
I love cheese. I love eating cheese with other people. I really wanted to like this movie. But it was like the first 2/3 of the movie was going one way, then all of a sudden the movie was pretty much over but completely different. I like Bonnie Hunt.
This movie was ridiculous.
This movie was not good either.
Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle really reenforced my not-so-secret desire to live in the country with a spouse and children and animals, which was totally not the point of the book. It also made me very aware of how the choices I make in my eating could be better, and certain steps I could take to be at least a little better. I don't think I have the capacity to be as strenuously local as Kingsolver's family was (especially with my new found love of grapefruit) but I'm hoping to do right by the city's local farmer's markets this summer...and maybe get better at making huge batches of things then freezing them for later in the year.
This movie was entertaining.
Here is a passage from Jasper FForde's The Big Over Easy. He is clever. Really, really clever.

"Dog Walkers Face Body-Finding Ban

Citizens who find a corpse while walking their dog may be fined if proposed legislation is made law, it was disclosed yesterday. The new measures, part of the Criminal Narrative Improvement Bill, have been drafted to avoid investigations looking cliched once they reach the docudrama stage. Other offenses covered by the act will be motorists declaiming in a huffy tone, "Why don't you cathc burglars/real criminals for a change?" when caught speeding, if there is a documentary crew in attendance. Civil liberatarians, motorist groups and dog walkers are said to be "outraged.""

Oh Jodi Picoult and the tangled webs of point of view and terrible things and court room drama and teenage occult you weave. She's good at it. Whatever.
James Macavoy is cute, but it's clear that he is short. How short is the question I'd like answered. How short?
Relatively entertaining...not really in terms of story, but in terms of individual actors' performances.
Craig Ferguson's Between the Bridge and the River was surprising. I don't know what I expected from a Scottish late night talk show host, but this wasn't it. The book definitely has a Tom Robbins feel to it, but with a Scottish twist?
Oh man, I finished the third season of The Wire and I feel a little empty inside.

Giant, Enormous, Who Cares What I Do, Media Post

Okay, so, I may eat a lot but I do at least one other thing on a regular basis, and that would be consume media like it's cheesecake. What? I don't even know, cheesecake is pretty rich so you wouldn't want to consume a lot of it...though it is also tasty. Whatever. In no particular order, what I have seen or read or listened to in the last few months:

For the last two years or so I've been listening to Terry Gross' Fresh Air in podcast form. And through this medium I have heard far more about how awesome The Wire is than I can stand. So, last week, I finally started watching it. And Terry was right. I'm hooked, even though I know that no good will come of any one in the first three episodes I've watched (it's like, nine million years ago, when I watched OZ...I had no idea what the show was about and it was brutal and terrible and I just couldn't stop for three seasons worth of DVDs).
I had some down time during my NYC weekend (ie time between people where I walk around aimlessly and end up buying books at a Barnes and Noble in Park Slope and beginning to read one of said books in a Dunkin Donuts). I bought three books, with a bonus gift certificate card from my work (Huckleberry is right, my job is quite nice). The first read was started in New York and completed last night: Steve Martin's Born Standing Up. The hype this book received, in a number of places (Terry Gross being one of them), almost guaranteed that I wouldn't be as 'wowed' by the book. It was, however, a good and interesting read...just not as open or honest as I think people enjoyed saying it was. But then, I struggle with how to write about my life three years ago when I was equally unfamous and unsuccessful, I have no idea what it would be like to write about 30 years back in my life during a time when I was super-duper-crazy good at what I was doing.
The fourth season of Nip/Tuck is a farce. A complete and utter farce. So ridiculous. But they seemed to know it. And that kind of almost made it okay.
I had high hopes for Be Kind Rewind. Unfortunately these hopes were generally left hanging. I blame Michel Gondry.
I have liked Beck for years. I remember a friend once telling me, around the time of Mutations, that Beck smoked crack...and I a) believed him and b) was really disappointed in Beck. Now I think that Beck didn't smoke crack but is a scientologist, and I don't care. Modern Guilt makes me happy, Guero made me happy, Sea Changes made me sad etc, etc, the dude is okay with me.
I rejoined Netflix, which I cancelled during the great unemployment of late 2007/early 2008. Becoming Jane is silly. But damn, I wish James Macavoy wanted to leave his Irish family to starve in order to marry and love me. Oh well.
Simple Life by Ruth Porter. This is a book my father gave my mother and me for Christmas, mainly because somehow, at some point, years ago, they met or something. Reading this book was like reading my own writing, only worse. By this I mean that this story, a story I would never tell, clearly was assuming that the reader wanted to fill in blanks of personality and nuance. Maybe that's not it at all. It may be that it reminded me of my own writing in the way the narrator would explain what someone was feeling/thinking in a way that made my skin crawl. No. It's that her main character was as fundamentally weak as my own novel's primary protagonist. And that there was a lot of exposition. I don't know. I may be being harsh. I did finish the book. Though I didn't cry or laugh at any point. Nor will I ever need to read it again.
I've enjoyed Hawksley Workman's music since my sophomore year of college. Treeful of Starling, his maybe latest album is different than his earlier works while keeping the best parts. The guy can sing. And I agree: a moth is not a butterfly.
This album of Hawksley Workman's needs a few more listenings before I decide what I think...but I know I like two songs. A kind of overdone but rockier album?
I never read How To Eat Fried Worms. Having seen the movie, I do not feel the need to ever read the book.
I started reading Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father before he was elected. It was a slow read, but not because of my displeasure with the prose or lack of interest in the subject. Reading this book I felt like I was reading the story and opinions of someone not thinking about becoming a president in the future. Any person who writes a book has an agenda; this book's agenda was not necessarily propoganda. What? I liked this book.
I can't lie. I liked this movie a little. It was over the top and impossible but, for god's sake, Kevin Klein was in it for an incredibly short three to five minutes of film! Maybe longer? One guy (not Kevin Klein) sharing three possible stories, all ending in Abigail Breslin as his daughter. A 'who done it' of the mother variety.
I think I watched this movie on too small a television screen. I imagine it would have moved me if it was a movie theater screen and sound system delivering the audio visuals. The way Christian Bale speaks in his Batman suit, what's up with that?
I like this album. I listen to and enjoy it, and if I were to be walking somewhere it might make my step a little more sprightly.
Another silly movie. Hilary Swank, I don't know, she just can't do romantic dramedy with the right tone. Gerard Butler, on the other hand, does a pretty good job of being a complete dreamboat of an Irish dead husband.
I think I might like Kid A. or Ok Computer the most.
This is good walk around on a day in winter that feels like the fall, as the weather changes into a storm. People with umbrellas but no rain walking weatherl. Ominous skies and the like.
T. and C. had Vampire Weekend in their car sometimes while I was in Indiana. But I don't think I really ever listened to the full album. Or maybe I did, but thought it was just a few songs? Whatever. This music makes me smile. I like the tempos.
I'm also going to watch Lost tonight. Hopefully get my bearings and figure out what it's all about (ha).