my tragic right hip

As my life is the list and the list is my life these days, here’s where I stand:

5. Get groomed – essentially get my hair done. I haven’t had it cut or coloured since before the non-wedding. I’ve also made an appointment to tame my ridiculously overgrown eyebrows. They’re frightening these days.

So, I’ve got a hair appointment for next Thursday and on Wednesday I’m getting my weedy eyebrows done. I’m spreading out the love. Grooming is relaxing, right?

10. Clean out the fridge (completely, that means, like washing everything).

Done and done. The fridge is bea-u-ti-ful. The scariest thing I found? A bottle of ranch dressing from when my brothers were staying with us. It expired last June. You know those are the things in the fridge you just never get around to throwing out, yeah, well, they’re all gone. I even put everything back in its proper place, dairy with dairy, fake meat products with fake meat products, fruits and veggies in their proper bins. It’s a sight to behold. Now the fridge is prepared for my mammoth meal plan undertaking; and I’m starting that today.

The companion novel to Emily Giffin’s Something Borrowed, Something Blue picks up with Darcy’s story; remember, she’s Rachel’s best friend, the main character from the other book.

When we last left them, Darcy and Dex had broken up, he and Rachel were together, and she was with Marcus, one of her ex-fiance’s groomsmen. Only there’s a twist, not only was Darcy also cheating on Dex (as he was with Rachel), but her affair has one kicker of a result: she’s pregnant. And when her love affair with Marcus collapses (as you know it should), for the first time in her life, she’s completely alone.

As a golden child, beautiful, popular, and all the other cliches, Darcy doesn’t deal well with her life falling completely and utterly apart. She goes off to stay in London with a childhood friend and, of course, ends up finding love and happiness in the end. And thankfully, two books later, Rachel and Darcy sort of make up, which is nice too. All in all, both novels were ‘brainless’ books—things I read as easily as I would watching a rerun of Friends.

You know, thank goodness for EW‘s Chicklit 101 or else I’d have no idea what books to read in that particular genre. And is it established enough to call itself a genre? Huh, that’s something I might mull over for a while today…

Annnywaaay, the Book A Day challenge is going well, I think. I’ve managed to keep it up for four days and have read some good books. I’ve started a more substantial book for tomorrow’s entry, Intuition by Allegra Goodman.

Book A Day book number three is Emily Giffin’s Something Borrowed. It’s a chicklit book (as you can tell from the pink cover and wedding-centric title) about two girls, Rachel and Darcy, best friends forever until the former falls in love with the latter’s fiance.

Giffin’s twist, to tell the story from Rachel’s point of view, the one doing the cheating, was a solid decision. It makes the book less about the drama and more about the human side of affairs, how sometimes they just happen because people make mistakes, how they fall in and out of love. Even though everyone knows the mistakes they are making, they still make them, and the whole book ends predictably.

However, it was a good, quick read, which is what I’m looking for these days.

Taddle Creek accepted another one of my poems! I think it’ll be in the Summer issue of the magazine, but I’m not sure if it’ll be online or in book. Very exciting!

You know, I find this commitment completely and totally noble in this day and age, and would like to imagine myself trying something like it. But I think I’d get as far as my next ‘mall’ day and completely give up. But maybe there’s a ‘Compact Compromise Lite’ I could take?

Because really what happens when you’ve got a bunch of holes in your socks and underwear, lose your favourite toque, get sick to death of scouring Kensington Market for just about everything and piss off all your friends because you’re too cheap to shell out for something that you need?

But then again, it’s only for a year.

I loved this movie.

Noah Baumbach’s portrait of a disintegrating family might just be the best film that I’ve seen in months, if not all this year. Two of the worst parents in the world, Bernard Berkman, a failed writer struggling to stay relevant, and Joan Berkman, an up-and-coming novelist, tell their sons they are divorcing.

As the two boys, Walt and Frank, struggle to deal with the news, alongside the most painful parts of adolescence, they can not escape their upbringing unscathed. It’s this coming-of-age aspect of the movie that deeply affected me most likely because of my own insanely messed up childhood.

The film has that painful quality to it; the sense of reality that’s so hard to capture where everything is awkward and unforgivable, sort of like watching the original version of The Office. The deft writing and superb performances are so real that the film hits you exactly where you like good art to go, and it doesn’t let up.

And ain’t that just right, my brother, as Ivan would say.

Fred Vargas’s The Three Evangelists, part of Vintage Canada’s new World of Crime imprint, is a superb little mystery. The second book in my Book A Day challenge, it tells the story of three hapless intellectuals whose neighbour goes missing after a mysterious tree is planted in her Paris garden.

Sophia, a retired opera singer, can’t get the tree out of her mind, so she asks the young men, the ‘evangelists’, Lucien (nicknamed St. Luke), Marc (St. Mark) and Mathias (St. Matthew), to do some digging, literally. They find nothing. But when Sophie disappears two weeks later everyone, including Marc’s disgraced ex-policeman godfather, is on the case.

What unfolds is a deceptively simple tale in a classic mystery fashion. The whodunit aspect consistently changes as each one of the historians uses his own methodical thinking to uncover the clues to the case. By the end, I was surprised to find out who the culprit was and sad that the book was finished. Vargas’s prose, crisp, clean and with a rich sense of French culture and lifestyle, whips you through the book at breakneck speed. It’s the perfect novel for Book A Day reading.

This “thriller” starring Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen was so pat and predictable that I kept waiting for the obvious twist to appear so that I could feel all smarty-pants that I had it all figured out all along. Sigh. And lordy, the puns, you could have some good fun with the title, Derailed, how fitting!

The acting was good; the movie, not so much. Am I wrong to like Jennifer Aniston though? I know she’s trying desperately to act her way out of being “Rachel” for the rest of her life, but I just wish she’d pick slightly better movies.

That said, I did watch it to the end, and not just because it had a character in it with my name (and she was Clive Owen’s wife, lucky her!), but maybe simply just to avoid having to watch an entire episode of American Idol in real time.

The very first entry in my Book A Day challenge is Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane Austen Book Club. It’s a non-starter of a little book about the lives of six people who come together to read Jane Austen’s novels. The story is told in the 3rd person but from each host’s point of view from within the month that she (or he as there’s one man) has the club to her house.

The book suffers slightly from the switching POVs, in that you don’t really get a true sense of any one character. The stories are sort of all over the place and the three most fully realized characters, Jocelyn, Sylvia and Allegra (her daughter) still feel kind of one-dimensional.

Regardless of the above, Fowler’s characters are quite interesting portraits, even if they’re not fully drawn and realized. And I quite like the ingenious idea of pulling them all together through their own readings and interpretations of Austen’s classic works. All in all, my final thoughts would have to be that the book’s narrative kind of suffers from a kind of jack of all trades, master of none sort of problem; it has lots of interesting information with no real guts to hold it all together. Oh, and I’m so tired of the meta-meta-meta pomo blah de blah crappy ‘cuteness’ that seems to plague so many books these days.

You know the moment when all the characters are at a library fundraiser and some pompous ‘writer’ of detective novels shows up and spews colloquialisms about the writing process and then steals someone else’s story? Moments like those are so done. Please stop writing them.

Despite that fact that I’m fully aware that I’m home because I need to rest and, ahem, rest assured I’m doing just that, I have made up a ‘to do’ list of projects to keep me occupied so I don’t go batty. Also, it’s all of the stuff I haven’t had any time to do because I’ve been so sick and tired that my weekends and, well, weekdays have been spent in a near comatose state.

As my RRHB said the other day, “I think the boredom’s going to kill you before the disease is.” Hallelujah and he knows me so well.

Annnywaay. In the effort of full disclosure, here is the list, in full:

• 1. Complete my own version of John Allemang’s Book A Day challenge. Follow with a Movie A Day challenge as well (the challenge here will be limiting myself to just one movie a day). I’m spending way, way too much time in front of the television.
• 2. Finish unpacking our boxes and transfer the unused contents to plastic storage bins that can go in the basement. This is so my RRHB (when he gets back from tour) can completely demolish the first floor. This is a selfish goal to some extent because I’m so sick of only living on one floor of the house that anything I can do to help the renovation along, I’m going to do.
• 3. Go through all my old writing and transfer as much as I can to the new computer. I bought a cute little clipboard from the Pottery Barn, just to hold up my pages!
• 4. Create a menu plan for the next three weeks. Then go grocery shopping.
• 5. Get groomed – essentially get my hair done. I haven’t had it cut or coloured since before the non-wedding. I’ve also made an appointment to tame my ridiculously overgrown eyebrows. They’re frightening these days.
• 6. Buy a good pair of walking sneakers for the better weather soon to arrive.
• 7. Research yoga classes for the diseased. Do such things exist?
• 8. Clean the downstairs hallway. Part of #2.
• 9. Get our taxes organized. Take everything to an accountant.
• 10. Clean out the fridge (completely, that means, like washing everything).
• 11. Clean out the car (see #10).
• 12. Clean the kitchen cupboards (see #10).
• 13. Write each day (and not just on the blog).
• 14. Finish uploading my music library back on to iTunes. Download the rest of the suggestions that friends have sent. And if you have any idea of songs I might like to write to, please send them along, I’m currently taking requests…
• 15. Write all of my non-wedding thank you notes.
• 16. See the eye doctor (appointment made), family doctor (appointment made), naturopath (appointment made) and osteopath (appointment not made yet…). This is all in the goal of spending the next 2.5 weeks getting as well as I humanly can get in the time I’ve got to myself.

Now I’ve got just under 3 weeks, and even in my weakened state, I think it’s a pretty doable list. And man, I love lists!