A strange sense of melancholia

I'm feeling... strange. I just got back from seeing "The History Boys" with Sebethis, and I thought it was brilliant. Thought-provoking, uplifting and then... the ending. It wasn't bad, far from it. It was just that the whole movie had such a sense of hope and aspiration and dreams as the boys went through the preparations for taking their entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge. And at the end (stop here if you don't want to know)...

...we find out how mundane their lives turn out to be. Even if they aren't mundane. Even though they did succeed, it felt like such a loss. Of the possibilities that are there while going to school. Of the potential futures. Of the subjunctive moments. I feel sad and as if I've lost something. I was choked up at the end not because of any one event, but because of the loss of something ephemeral and something that I felt very personally. And it's not that I'm unhappy because I'm definitely not. It's that there's part of me that I was that I'm never going to be again. There will always be possibility and moments, but those particular ones were a product of a very specific time and place, and they can't be relived, only reinterpreted.

The agony of being a cover model

How Did I End Up On The Cover Of This Romance Novel?

Last week at the supermarket, while shopping for my weekly supply of three dozen eggs and 12 pounds of mutton, I spotted a rack near the checkout...

Funny by itself, even funnier when you go to Smart Bitches, Trashy Books and read about the Duncan Larksthrush fanfic contest.

I used to know these...

I got hooked on the Geography Challange this week. Disgustingly, my highest score is 80%, and my average is around 50%. I might suck at it, but it's highly addictive.

How awesome is this?

I get a daily email newsletter called Shelf Awareness, and in today's edition was the following article. What a brilliant idea!

Weller's Readers in the Window
Cool idea of the day. Every afternoon through Christmas Eve, volunteer readers sit in the windows of Sam Weller's Zion Bookstore, Salt Lake City, Utah, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.

"Decorated like a living room, the window is warm and comes stocked with snacks and hot drinks," the paper wrote. "When the store set out criteria for the window, it asked for all kinds of families--however people defined the term. So far, readers who signed up range from teenage friends to couples on dates to a grandfather and his grandson. 'It's everyone,' said Jennifer Nielsen, who is in charge of decorating the store's windows and coordinating the readers' shifts. 'All the customers have loved it.' "

Most people read, silently or aloud, but some have played board games or chat. Friends and family of readers receive a discount on purchases while the readers are reading. Readers themselves receive a discount after their face time is up.

All better!

Everything is back on track and I'm no longer depressed (or very stressed). Yay! That was a bad six days I just had, and it was more than enough anxiety for one lifetime.

Now back to our regular programming:

Cute baby animals!

I have a acquired a food fairy

Yesterday at the end of the day there were two massive chocolate bars waiting on my desk. Today I step away from the department for five minutes and when I come back there is a slice of cherry cream cheese bread on my desk. A girl could get used to this...

I guess the upside to being awfully stressed and depressed is that people feel the need to feed me. They also do lovely things like arrange to have an adorable two-year-old pay me a cheer-up visit.

I'm trying not to be tiresome about everything that's going on so as not to become that whiny girl. Times like these make me realize what wonderful friends and family I have. Thank you everyone - I do love you all, and I'll try not to take advantage of your broad shoulders too often.

Oh, for goodness sake

Sometimes there just have to be common-sense limits, don't you think?

Lawmaker aims to allow the blind to hunt

Durian

Smells bad, bad for you