Is this my big comeback to the blogging world? You bet-cha! *wink

I can't shake it. But I could bop to this. I need energetic study music instead of all my mopey crap.

I find myself exponentially outpaced by the tumblr crowd and also mumbling to myself about varoius things. (Now, there's an idea. mumblr. The blog platform for the painfully shy. They type in corners.) There is a lot of grumbling and grousing, especially in the mornings. Every morning is like Monday morning. So, through no connection of logic at all, I shall mumble more to the internets. Also, I make this resolution every few months. Just like every week, I decide, Oh yes, I shall wake up early and never be rushed. Such human dramedy, this thing called delusion.

For example, news of note today: 1) I sort of rinsed off two dishes and put them into the drying rack and then realized that the drying rack is not the dishwasher. And 2) I bought a brussel sprout tree today. I will have to take pictures.

I will have to say, it was tempting to vote for the All Day Breakfast Party candidate running for House.

Another gem from Sarah Haskins.

This week's Project Runway challenge was to design something for Diane von Furstenberg's fall collection which is inspired by the 1948 movie, A Foreign Affair. I'm not sure how relevant a few key-word terms bandied about like spy, Berlin, Shanghai are to the movie plot, but of course the designers run with what they can. Shanghai is popular. ASIAN INFLUENCES. Oh people love indiscriminate Asian influences.

I almost missed this but I think Joe, while making his "Shanghai-inspired" outfit and showing it to another designer, breaks out into ching-chong-song.

Oh no you didn't.

SIGH. I don't get it. I mean, dude, you are on television. You are being filmed all the time. When is doing that ever okay? Or in any way funny? LAME. And this kind of thing is caught so often in the media (hello Spain's Olympic basketball team). What the hell? P.S. the outfit sucked. I rate you three lames. LLL.

So return your library books before your brain becomes cheese like mine.

(via bookslut.

I've been told that when you're not working, you lose track of what day it is. And that makes sense. In the office, you're confronted with the time and date at every turn. E-mail! Deadlines! Schedules! Meetings! Weekends! (Oh, the gorgeous weekends.) And without that sort of structure in your face, time gets all melty.

My last week of work was the first week of July, and time has turned Dali-mode since then. Apparently it's the last week of July now. WHO KNEW? Besides looking for a new home-sweet-home in DC, a couple outings, and frantically working on two articles, I can't figure out what else I've been up to these past three weeks, twenty-one days. I feel like I've been busier than when I had been working. People, I've been missing episodes of So You Think You Can Dance.

So I'm kind of spiteful about the fact that I haven't been able to exactly enjoy my time off. The whole reason I ended work with a cushion of time before starting law school was so that I could decompress and take a vacation, maybe go somewhere nice for a few days. But life was like, no that plan sucks because you are totally lame and won't be able to find decent housing in DC until the end of July. And then I was like, Okay, fine, life, I just want the simple luxury of hanging out 'til I'm just kind of bored. And irritably life dismissed me with, chuh, whatevs, you know you're starting school in a few weeks, you have to get your shit together and starting packing up things and also deal with your for-some-reason super-cranky parents, and what? you haven't signed that lease? And then I was like, listen, bitch, you're a cereal.

Or maybe that's not how it went down.

Also, though I think I've written about this before, remember that game, Life, with the blue and pink cars and stuff? That game is totally not fun when you are actually an adult and have to do those things for reals.

Bruni's La Derniere Minute via Ceci N'est Pas un Blog's nice collection of French tunes in honor of Bastille Day.

(Also, I almost always listen to my music on my computer on shuffle unless I got a new album to check out. Which is just now striking me as weird. I know I'm losing the sense of the album etc. etc... but I like the randomness of it.)

Here's a short animated film by Jeff Chiba Stearns that I liked. 2,300 sticky notes were used.

I've only recently started composing to-do lists, realizing that there was a lot of little stuff at work I would not remember to do. My lists are super boring and full of lame. I feel like I should spruce my to-do lists up with megalomaniacal ambitions and whimsy. Maybe I should remember how to spell megalomaniacal first without checking the dictionary. That is number one on the list.

Except I was reading something. I was in the middle of Marco Pierre White's memoir Devil in the Kitchen. Obviously it didn't make much of an impact on me.

I find I often have problems with memoirs. The main reason is that there is usually a great reason for writing a work about the person. The problem is that the writing and editing can fail to live up to the material. And then the book, in turn, fails to live.

Marco Pierre White is a superfamous, influential British chef and one of, if not the, originator of that bad boy chef persona in and out of the kitchen. Without him, there'd be no Gordon Ramsay, no Hell's Kitchen, no publicity for cooking mavericks. The book takes you through his lonely youth and passion-fueled career and various business and personal relationships. Though there are interesting insights into working in the restaurant business littered throughout and you get the sense that White is struggling through some tough personal memories, it all seems to fall kind of flat and generic -- the very opposite of his culinary creations and his own singular character. There's little of the personal analysis or shared introspection that Anthony Bourdain brings to the table (but perhaps his writing skills are better than his cookery?) in his food-world books.

In the photos that are included in the middle, MPW looks much happier, smiling, fishing and with his wife and kids. At least he seems much more content and at peace with himself.

Whatever, I know I'm not making much sense. But what I really want to know, is what is the rectangular block accompanying the burger and the salad in the lead photo in the article??? Is this rectangular block tasty??? Now THAT's a story.

I'm all for the health of kids. But I think I do miss the all-out gluttony of Cookie Monster. Well, I guess he still has monster-like eating habits, even for the fruit. And that is what is endearing.

My favorite monsters on Sesame Street were Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster. Telling eh?

Everything is better with muppets! For a second, I was scared that Feist would foist her loopy counting from the original song: 1-2-3-4-5-6-9-10. But that would've been silly. I learned how to count up to 10 in Spanish from Sesame Street. And that's the random personal factoid of today.