Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Serious fashion advice

At what point, temperature-wise, would you not look askance at a woman in flip-flops (assuming they were otherwise appropriate to her level of dress)?

If you choose to answer this one, please also say where you live. I suspect, for example, that 50 degrees does not sound as downright tropical to you DC folks as it does to me.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Randy

I simultaneously:
  • believe TSA "safety" measures are essentially cosmetic (and therefore ridiculous and invasive), and 
  • am giggling a lot that this happened to Rand Paul on his way to speak at March for Life.

I mean, you know, speaking of ridiculous and invasive.

What do you think he thinks libertarian means?

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

A minus

As a child, I loved TV.

And naturally, that made any restrictions very frustrating.

My loving parents frequently restricted the amount of time I was allowed to spend watching TV, of course, but just as exasperating (depending on the day) was that, to my young self, they seemed to be forbidding so many of what were probably the best shows. Like:
  • Laverne and Shirley (sexist)
  • Diff'rent Strokes (my mother caught the Very Special Episode where Arnold meets a child molester)
  • Three's Company (also sexist)
  • Eight Is Enough (Frankly, I think this one was because my parents couldn't remember which was which of Three's Company and Eight Is Enough; better safe than sorry.)
  • I Love Lucy (also sexist, but a classic, so permitted but only occasionally, and only after a lot of discussion of what respectful relationships were and why Lucy and Ricky's was not one)
  • Anything that might give me nightmares (which was a lot of shows, including Scooby-Doo cartoons)
  • Any PG-13 movies that came out the first summer of PG-13 (when I was twelve)
  • Dukes of Hazzard (violent)
  • The A-Team (also violent)
So eye-rollingly frustrating. Everybody could watch those shows. And talk about them for days in school afterward.

And so tonight, 29 years after it first came out, I finally started watching The A-Team.

Less than three minutes into the first episode, I encountered the first instance of gratuitous sexual violence. Done with The A-Team.

Stupid parents.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Looking for bangs in all the wrong places

I didn't think I could find the search terms that brought people here. Turns out I can.

I did know that I get more traffic than I'd expect, based on the number of people I know who read regularly and the number of comments I get.

Turns out, that may be because virtually no one who gets here via search is actually looking for this blog. Sorry about that, visitors. Stick around anyway. I'm pretty entertaining.

Search terms that brought people to CMC in the last week:
  • images of bangs 
  • straight across bangs 
  • baby bangs hair styles 
  • baby bangs with medium hair 
  • city to country blog 
  • coty mouse country blog 
  • country mouse city mouse have sex with their girlfriends 
  • difference between the country mouse and city mouse 
  • try to remember the kind of november

Lookin'

In high school, my friends and I had a seemingly endless stream of "bits" — inside jokes we'd just lapse into. My friends were mostly boys, mostly artistic, mostly dorky. We had an excellent time.

In one (and I'm not sure how well this will translate to the written word), we'd stand around a car and be a mechanic character we'd developed. This guy always started slowly with "I'm lookin' atcha cah" (we were in Massachusetts, after all) "and it looks like yer gunna need a new..."

And then we'd just rattle off a lengthy list of car parts to replace. As one person ran out, someone else would jump in.

"I'm lookin' atcha cah, and it looks like yer gunna need a new ball joint timing belt brake pad windshield wiper rear door transmission spark plug tail light battery roof rack hubcap..."

At some point recently, my father pointed out to me that I might be living in "I'm lookin' atcha cah."

That is perhaps a too-long way to update you on my basically uneventful weekend, during which my starter died.

Friday, January 6, 2012

A few words (and a video) on NH politics

Those of you who've been following the blog since the beginning will remember that it started because so many of my DC friends seemed to think moving to New Hampshire would be like moving to a different planet. For a few days, I kept up with those DC friends by sending mass e-mails, and then thought maybe a blog made more sense.

I still do some of those posts about what a different world New Hampshire is from DC, sometimes, but not as much as I used to, because I've settled into what I usually think of as a pretty ordinary ruralish life up here. The funny stories are at my expense more often than they're at New Hampshire's expense.

My extended family, from places like California and Connecticut and Maryland and Massachusetts and New York and Washington state, has not entirely escaped the can-you-believe-this saga, because they are more likely to ask how my job is going, and are more likely, therefore, to get treated to a big dose of New Hampshire politics — particularly over the summer, when the legislature cut more than half its already-smallest-in-the-nation appropriations to higher ed. That has very real repercussions for me, the people I work with, the students I work for, our ability to serve the community...

Anyway, Rachel Maddow did a thing on Republicans in New Hampshire, and I liked it.


For your edification, here's some of the ridiculousness going on in the state that isn't about electing a president:
If you don't understand why I think some of these things are ridiculous, please ask. I'm happy to:
  • explain, or 
  • have my mind changed.
I would love to think it's not as bad as it seems.




Monday, January 2, 2012

What I Read on My Winter Vacation: Unfinished Business

If you read the rules, you saw that I wasn't going to finish anything I didn't want to.

Books I did not finish included:

  • Atwood, Margaret. The Tent. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2006. Print. Got to p. 15. I love Margaret Atwood, but couldn't get into this collection of essays that's been on my shelf for a few years now. I'll try again another time.
  • Renault, Mary. The King Must Die. New York: Bantam, 1984. Print. Got to p. 9. It just felt like it was trying too hard, or something. I don't even know where this book came from; someone probably gave it to me in high school. It's the kind of thing other people would have thought I would have liked in high school; that is how pretentious I was.
  • Evans, Howard Ensign. Wasp Farm. Garden City, NY: Published for the American Museum of Natural History [by] the Natural History, 1963. Print. Got to p. 13. I found this one on my parents' bookshelf, and can therefore be forgiven for thinking it was about WASPs, rather than wasps. But it is in fact about insects, and the two or three new things I learned from the first 13 pages were not enough to sustain my interest.
  • Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values. New York: HarperTorch, 2006. Print. This one, borrowed from a friend, I'm actually still reading; it's only on this list because I didn't get to finish it. If you want to claim this as a book you haven't finished yet, may I suggest saying that you're really enjoying the narrative style, but so far you're not sure you can agree with Pirsig's premise, and wonder if that's a sign of the shifting times and the changing nature of the relationship between technology and art (or function and aesthetic) since 1974, when the book was written. Of course, you may be a little off-base, since you're only 150 pages in.

Sometimes I clean the house to watch TV


Even still more fun with Netflix


Um, what?