Reading, Listening, Watching

What’s happening with me right now?

• Reading (book): I’m two days and two chapters into Shirley by Charlotte Bronte. I’ve missed reading over the last month. We’ll see how long it lasts.
• Reading (poetry): Weirdly obsessed with Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality right now.
• Watching: I have to admit that I’ve been watching Game of Thrones to tranquilize my brain. I just finished season one.
• Listening: I’ve been playing Aicha by Cheb Khaled pretty much every day on the way to school.
• Eating: For breakfast, the pudding-like French soy yogurt in either pistachio or hazelnut-almond flavors, bread with doing jam, and fruit. For lunch, pesto, vegetables, and couscous. For dinner, vegetables and some protein type thing. Or my squash tofu curry.

The Best of Mind-Numbing TV

I’m likely to be cited in a scholarly paper- about ‘Say Yes to the Dress’, of all things.  How did this happen, I hear you ask?  During my freshman year in college (Spring semester) I took English 120, Reading and Writing the Modern Essay.  Professor Graham was excellent: she introduced me to non-Charlotte’s Web/Stuart Little E.B. White, who is still one of my favorite essayists, and made us wear adhesive mustaches during one class (I forget of what that was apropos)(I hate dangling prepositions).

Anyway, she posted on Facebook recently (yes, we’re Facebook friends) asking if anyone watched ‘Say Yes to the Dress.’ And because I was a bit embarrassed have no shame in owning up to my guilty pleasures, I said ‘Maybe a little.’
Pffft. Maybe a little as in I used to watch it every week after riding lessons while having lunch. So she asked me a few questions about it- What I liked, were the accents notable, etc…

Word Up!

Anyone here ever watch Word Girl (and her monkey sidekick, Captain Fuzzyface?)
No? Me neither.

It came out around the time I was too old to watch it (early middle school, maybe?) when most of my friends were watching Cartoon Network and Disney Channel and all that.  Somehow I kind of skipped right from PBS Kids to Gossip Girl and then to movies and now almost all the movies I watch are R-rates and I have no idea how that happened.

Les jeux olympiques

It’s good to be in Paris for the Olympics and realize that it’s not just the US that focuses their broadcasts almost exclusively on their own athletes. France does it too!
Right now I have the full body thumb war that is classical wrestling on in the background, France versus Brazil…
Is that an unfair description? It seems accurate to me, but somehow John Oliver thought ‘foreplay with horse’ was a credible way to sum up dressage and I just… no.
Dressage is dancing with horses! And if all dancing is foreplay then I’m fucked, what with the hip hop, jazz, burlesque, competitive ballroom, and all.