You broke up with Steve because of a lack of consideration he was showing for you, not because you are a crazy jealous bitch. Don't be friends with him unless he apologizes--for the behavior pattern, not any one specific instance--and don't sleep with him unless he's really changed. "Getting back together" is better because once you're happy and settled, he can take you for granted, it doesn't mean that things will stay good.

You wanted him to be your boyfriend; he wanted you to be the girl that sometimes came up with fun stuff to do, played computer games, and fucked him whenever no one else was around to. His money, his dick, and his companionship were not, towards the end at least, worth all the heartbreak, and they may never be again. Other people have money, other men have dicks, and there are plenty of people who will keep you warm at night. You are NOT too good for all of them.

If you're missing him, if you want to bring him back to anchor your life, go make friends. Find some people who have the power to cheer you up with their presence but not the power to break your heart.

Remember: You didn't just break up because he didn't call on your birthday, or because he forgot he forgot your birthday. That was part of a larger pattern of behavior stretching back at least to when you broke up with Kyle. That was just the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a good thing he did something so clearly awful, because it gave you the conviction to not let him convince you to stay.

Love, past Eleanor

P.S. If you really want to spend time with him, go tell Andrew why, and then LISTEN TO WHAT HE HAS TO SAY.

P.P.S. To anyone who's still reading this journal, I got the idea from How I Met Your Mother but unlike Ted I don't have a For my Biographer box. Yet.

and I end up just bitching at the persons involved about it, or bottling it up, and then suddenly I had a thought: Way back in high school, I used to unload those sorts of thing on livejournal! So here goes, an e-mail I sent to Sage Tyrtle of http://quirkynomads.com, one of the best podcasters on the internet today in my opinion. (My opinion of her is no way tainted by the fact that myself and my improvisational skills will be featured in an upcoming episode.)

Dear Sage,

So at work today I didn't have my iPod because I wanted to be sociable, but then I ended up doing lots of mindless tasks by myself so my mind had lots of time to wander onto things like what tiny little things are bothering me about my really great life with my boyfriend--and I guess a lot of the problems arise from the fact that he thinks we both think we are technically "single non-monogamous individuals who have been dating for quite some time who have shed boyfriend/girlfriend status but continue to see each other often and also say 'I love you' a lot," or something equally eschewing of labels, but it is easier to refer to him as "my boyfriend" because I apparently cannot successfully eschew labels.

But ANYHOW I was getting quite upset by fighting with him in my head, so I made excuses to go work on a computer-based long-term project for the last hour of the day, then went back into your archives and
listened to some streaming QN episodes from 2005 and was totally distracted from my bullshit drama by how much better your podcast is now than it was in 2005. So thanks for that.

Eleanor

P.S. This reminds me of an e-mail I wrote to Brenda Dayne or somebody my freshman year of college, all "I listen to your podcast when life gets me down and find it very empowering," but with more snark. Sorry.

P.P.S. I think I'm gonna go write in my livejournal for the first time since high school. TTYL, whatever the kids are saying these days, etc.

Found this meme floating around . . . It is the LibraryThing.com 91 books most often tagged "unread" (numberically) meme! (Technically the mem is 106, but I was getting bored . . . I've recently taken up knitting and also for the first time in a very long time school is not a refuge. Not that this explains anything . . .

Instructions found by poking the first few Google results and modifying them to suit my needs, book list peeled off LT just now.

The rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk * to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your tbr list. Bold and italicize books read in an abridged edition, and bold and underline books you've started and fully intend to get around to finishing.

* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
One hundred years of solitude -- I read an excerpt in Spanish class, although it was so short I don't think it counts.
Crime and punishment
Wuthering Heights -- If I ever getting around to completing my LT catalog, this will have an "unread" tag from me, too . . .
Catch-22
* The Silmarillion
Don Quixote
The Odyssey
The brothers Karamazov
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
War and peace
* Jane Eyre
A tale of two cities
The name of the rose
Moby Dick
The Iliad
Emma
Vanity fair
Love in the Time of Cholera
The Blind Assassin
The Canterbury tales
* Pride and prejudice -- although the second time was for a class, not by choice
The historian
Great Expectations
The kite runner -- I'm not marking it "hated", but I fail to see what all the fuss is about.
The time traveler's wife
Life of Pi
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societi
Atlas shrugged
Foucault's pendulum
The grapes of wrath
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Frankenstein
Mrs. Dalloway
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Middlemarch
Sense and sensibility
The Count of Monte Cristo
Memoirs of a Geisha
The sound and the fury
Brave New World
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I)
* American gods -- You know, maybe I should have left the numbers in, or crunched the tags the other way; only 92 out of 10310 people have tagged this "unread", for example.
Middlesex
The poisonwood Bible
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
A portrait of the artist as a young man
The picture of Dorian Gray
Dune
The satanic verses
Gulliver's travels
Mansfield Park
The three musketeers
The corrections
The inferno
Oliver Twist
The Fountainhead
To the lighthouse
A clockwork orange
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Persuasion by Jane Austen
One flew over the cuckoo's nest
The scarlet letter
Robinson Crusoe
* Anansi boys
The once and future king
Atonement
The god of small things
* A short history of nearly everything
Oryx and Crake
Dubliners
Cryptonomicon
Angela's ashes
Beloved
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed -- I'm actually not sure if I've read this more than once . . .
The hunchback of Notre Dame
In cold blood : a true account of a multiple murder
Lady Chatterley's lover
A confederacy of dunces
Les misérables
Watership Down
The prince
* The amber spyglass
Beowulf : a new verse translation
A farewell to arms
Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
The Aeneid
# Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (69/4624)
# Sons and lovers by D.H. Lawrence (69/2562)
# The personal history of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (69/4307)
# The road by Cormac McCarthy (67/5095)
# Possession : a romance by A.S. Byatt (67/4123)
# The history of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding (67/2131)
# The book thief by Markus Zusak (67/3547)
# Gravity's rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (66/3259)
# The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (66/3045)
# Tender is the night by F. Scott Fitzgerald (66/3128)
# Candide, or, Optimism by Voltaire (65/5082)
# Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro (65/4315)
# The plague by Albert Camus (65/4604)
# Jude the obscure by Thomas Hardy (65/2944)
# Cold mountain by Charles Frazier (64/4158)</b>

My dad's in China, and I just got his "I'm here & ok" e-mail. One thing caught my eye:

"I got to see the north pole, as it was light when we went over. It
looked icy with large cracks in the ice."

With large cracks in the ice . . . shit.

Hello, livejournal land! I just realized I haven't posted in wonks! Well, actually, I've been "realizing" that a lot over the past eight weeks or so. HOWEVER I just realized that I was going to post my posts from my "50 book challenge" thread over at LibraryThing. And the one I posted today seemed like a particularly apt place to get back to it. (Those of you who are interested in the 21 books preciously read: Follow that link!)

23: The Assault on Reason by Al Gore

Another part of the reason I haven't been reading [note to LJ readers: in addition to school and not being able to finish books, just start them, and also extensive reading of periodicals) is because I've been watching The West Wing on DVD. I love it to bits. It makes me want to be . . . maybe not a politician, but one of those people. Maybe a paper-pusher or a cogwheel in the bureaucracy or something, but it's actually changed my ambitions. And this is a prelude to saying: Al Gore, why are you not my president? I mean, seriously. Those of you who have been tracking my age will have noticed that I was 10 when he ran against Bush; I was too young to vote at the time (my state went blue; it's one of the ones that threatens to swing but hasn't in a while), but I distinctly remember being really unexcited about him. I liked Ralph Nader. Probably because I live in hippieville USA, but whatever. But the POINT is, maybe when I grow up I will be a politico, like a Josh Lyman equivalent or something (actually I just love Josh Lyman to bits because he is a genius BUT also a total fuckup AND YET he is rich and smart and successful and powerful and hilarious and AS SUCH I totally want to be him when I grow up. Also I wouldn't mind sleeping with him) and if I become one of those political operative guys when I grow up, if I have a candidate like Al Gore I will MAKE him exciting!

. . . And somewhere in there this stopped being about the book. ANYHOW. It's a pretty good one. I recommend it highly and so on. No, seriously. He says a lot of those things you always wished politicians said, about how debate is a good thing, and science is a good thing, and the first amendment is a good thing.

Also he does some silly Al Gore things, like talk about how the Chinese word for "crisis" = "danger" + "opportunity" and how Americans can do anything they set their minds to. Also he mentions the vice-president's name any time he talks about a presidential administration, which I find halfway between arrogant and endearing. (He does the same things, incidentally, in An Inconvenient Truth, which will be book #26.)

But these are not traits that make someone unworthy of the presidency! I mean, he wrote a book. And obviously he has staff and editors and a wife and things, but I've always thought that the sort of person who always meant to write a book, and who has written a book or two, would be a more interesting president than the sort of person who cynically hires a ghost writer. (Yes, I am channeling The West Wing again. Shut up.)

But I think I will talk about the book now, and not Al Gore! Really! (Maybe.) The book is, essentially, advocating the increased use of reason in our government (and yes, this book is indeed America-centric). The opening scene is one of Robert Byrd speaking into the congressional record to an empty Senate chamber; this could be indicative of something the matter with American democracy, or perhaps indicative of the fact that Robert Byrd is a barmy coot. But NO MATTER!

Throughout the book, Gore takes American government, media, and society to task for basically being utter failures, and advocates a great discussion with experts and ideas and diction and energy and honesty and I think I am going to go watch some West Wing now instead of letting it leak into my posts about books by Al Gore.

I was just remembering--I used to be a total Oz junkie when I was a kid. I hadn't really thought about it in a while, but I might go to Chicago to see Wicked with the Theater department (although I have lost my checkbook and therefore need to purchase new checks), and I did "Over the Rainbow" as my audition song for the musical (didn't get in, because I'm not in choir or a ballerina). And I was just looking though this pop-up The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and commenting on how the style of the drawings is clearly based on the original illustrator, who wasn't the same original illustrator for the sequels, and how unfortunate it was that there was a pop-up of the hammerheads when the abridgment had cut them out of the text. And then I remembered when I read Wicked and Son of a Witch and thought--this is Oz for grownups. This is the Oz of the neverending sequels by L. Frank Baum and others, Oz that's been promoted into a higher plane of reality from whence even wireless telegraph signals cannot penetrate, and Glinda still reads our fates in her book. Except it's an Oz with, you know, sex and politics and murder and things. (Son of the Witch had possibly the hottest non-explicit sex scene I have ever read.) And, OK, it is an incredibly amazing story, and everything, but I remember finishing the book and thinking, you couldn't make that a musical without getting rid of all the best parts. But, you know, I still want to see the musical, because I am kind of a theater person.

And I've been thinking a lot recently about what I remember that you might not expect. Because I don't necessarily remember everything other people do, everything that might be "important". But, I dunno, I remember my second grade class play fairly well. And I was hanging out with Zach on Monday and for some reason I mentioned that I used to have my Dear America books organized by color, because they all had identical spines, and the order didn't really matter, and besides, chronological order gets dicey when you have so many books set in e.g. the 1840s. And he was all incredulous, like, why didn't you organize them by title? And I said, I don't own those books any more, and I don't remember the titles--but I do remember the colors. Like the Oregon Trail one was kind of a grey-blue. And there were paint chips around, so he was all, can you pick it out on a paint chip? And I could. (And yet I couldn't remember theta crit on my physics final to save my life . . .)

So I was going to be like, hey livejournal, here I am back to cry on your shoulders when something kinda shitty happened, but then I found out Heath Ledger died. So I'm going to distract myself with that tragedy, or maybe the tragedy of the media sticking its fingers in its ears and going "la la la la la" instead of covering John Edwards. Or something. Because that's much more fun than real life . . .

I thought about doing 50bookchallenge this year, but the format felt like too much of a hassle. But then I found the equivalent LibraryThing group, and a forum thread seemed like a much more reasonable way to try to keep track. BUT one of my odder new year's resolutions is to post things places online, instead of just lurking. Because lurking gets to be no fun, and your flist inflates to include squoodles of people whose journals you never do have time to read. So, without further ado:

I don't know how many books I read in a normal year; fifty seems like too few to be a real goal, but then, I don't know about 80, or 100. So my goal is just to keep track--something that's surprisingly difficult for me. I'm also going to do a map for books this year that "take me places"--stay tuned!

So I'm starting with Book #1: The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel, finished yesterday.

This was a quite fascinating book, though I do admit I bought it based largely on the prettiness of its cover. It contains a description of the experimental travel "movement", originally French. Many "games" are outlined, from travelling to a location found by rolling a dice and counting in the index of a world atlas to wandering around one's own city based on arbitrary directions to trying to get large(ish) groups of strangers to do something cool. I found the tone occasionally pretentiously "arty", and I was glad that real people's experiences with the games had been included, to give a better sense of what's really possible. Because of the sort of a person I am, I will probably never undertake some of these; but several look like "fun things to do while bored", or even, "fun ideas to base a novel around". All in all, a fun read, and much more.

And if you want to see my thread on LibraryThing, here you are--at the moment it's just this, but it will grow, and grow, hopefully.

And now I relaly ought to go to bed, as school starts tomorrow.

So this is my take (and a bit of icklefickle's take too) on tonight's democratic debate, with contributions from an e-mail forward (Hillary) and a friend (angry young voter). Hope you enjoy!

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Hillary Clinton: " I have vast experience with chickens and if elected, I will ensure that EVERY chicken has the ability to cross any road they desire."

Barak Obama: " My opponents say that they wouldn't like that chicken to cross the road, they would like to boil the hope right out of him. But I believe that chicken needs change. And I believe that chicken has hope in its heart. I believe that all chickens can find common gound in the middle of the road." [ed. Where they will get run over . . .]

Mike Huckabee: "I believe that America--and its chickens--have gotten off track. I think the American people care about the chickens, and about compassionate foreign policy, as much as they care about family values. But I believe that chicken has hope in its heart. It's time to get thatt chicken back on the right track."

Bill Richardson: "I am the only candidate here with experience as a governor, dealing with chickens every day since I took office." (P.S. I am not mentioning that I grew up in Mexico where there are chickens because I am shooting my campaign on the foot.)

John Edwards: "My father and my grandmother worked in a mill, and my great-grandfather raised chickens, and that put me through law school. So I know that chicken crossed the road because it fought, and because it struggled, and rejected the entrenched special interests that control Washington today."

Angry young voter: "Because the coop and farmhouse were rigged, and rigged against him."

Rudy Giuliani: "On September 11, I saw that chicken try to cross the road. And it was a difficult day for America, but that chicken persevered." (P.S. And I was the mayor! Really! USA! USA! Pay no attention tot he Iowans behind the curtain . . .)

I had early notification/scholarship priority on my Tulane app, right? And so we get back from New Jersey, 9:00 Friday night, and there's this letter from Tulane. Which looks quite important, not just those junkificatious ones that never stop coming. And it turns out I got in!! And also a rather nice scholarship. So that'll make these last few applications a little easier . .