apropos of anything

Tonight at 7:35 p.m. at the Ted, and that’s where AM and I’ll be. (Rooting for opposite teams, of course, because AM, much as we love her, has ties to St. Louis and therefore can’t help but cheer for the wrong team when they come to town.)

On tap for the site tomorrow: all you people who went off on hijabis last week, I’m through keeping my comments to myself. On tap for the house tomorrow: massive, intensive cleaning. Go away, spiderwebs.

Five blogs have I written since last Wednesday. Five blogs have I discarded since last Wednesday, for reasons of unworthiness, boringness, or I-don’t-want-to-post-that-ness. Bleargh. Certain people and situations have simply sapped my will to write.

So instead, I shall link! There’s the regular current links o’ interest to the right, but for a short time, available right here in this very space, a bevy of blogs just for your procastination purposes. Try getupgrrl on how women are selfish, Sarah B. on accidentally sending an email to the wrong person (I did that yesterday! At work! Spammed a whole list with a semi-personal email to Kate! It was one of those times that you just wish the floor would open up and swallow you whole, but at least I didn’t call anybody “schmoopie.”), Alice on how not to make pot roast or the latest shenanigans of Rob’s adorable daughter Schuyler. And don’t forget the usual suspects!

So read up, and hopefully I’ll be back soon.

At first, I didn’t understand the phenomenon. I mean, what was the point of those “— brown bags”? I figured they were generic paper bags department stores bought when they didn’t want to spend money on the flashier, personalized kind.

Now I have one of these. Wheeee!

Eventually, I discovered those bags were actually emblematic of the flashiest of flashy department stores, the one favored by shopping queen Rachel Green (and virtually every other (savvy or not) woman on television): Bloomingdales. We didn’t have one of those in Atlanta, though, so the bags remained nothing more than a prop for me… until about two years or so ago when Federated Department Stores knocked off all the Macy’s in state and six months later replaced them with (all together now) Bloomingdale’s.

Imagine my disappointment when a quick ten-minute spin through three levels led me to believe Bloomingdale’s was not my kind of store. I don’t exactly do Juicy Couture, nor could I give two figs about Prada or Versace. My life has never seemed less fulfilling because I don’t follow runway fashion. It’s possible I just didn’t know what I was missing.

This weekend I went shopping with Fatima, who convinced me first to give Bloomie’s another chance and second to try on a pair of 7 jeans when I mentioned that I’d been considering getting a pair. I first heard of 7s when Sarah B. wrote about them, but they’ve been on my mind since the nurse in the vascular lab suggested them as a solution to my Nothing Fits Me! jeans problem. And there we were, in bright white Bloomingdales, surrounded by 7s in varous styles and shades.

I modeled. I bought. I pretended I didn’t just pay an insane amount for jeans. (Which, by the way, had better be the last pair I ever buy in my life.) And I walked out of the store the proud new owner of a medium brown bag. You’d think the designer jeans would have been the more momentous of the two.

Cartoon courtesy of Time magazine.

Fair warning to everyone, especially those named “Ken” and “Ivan,” that I am particularly foul mood this morning as a result of a series of unfortunate events last night and an oh-so-lovely start-the-day message today. Why do people feel compelled to send such notes first thing in the morning so they can rankle all day?

Not even my fabulous new pants are enough to make me feel better. That’s when you know it’s bad, people.

When I realized on Thursday that I must have lost my mind to agree to go to Augusta this of all weekends, it was too late to back out since I’d promised my mother I would take her shopping at Pier One. She won’t go herself — it’s long and complicated — so I was pretty much stuck.

The Golden Bell at the Augusta National. The azaleas aren’t super visible in this picture, but they’re there.

I can’t remember the last time I was in Augusta during the Masters. Hands-down, you cannot find better Masters coverage than the Augusta Chronicle; they do a full “pull-off” section that takes the place of the front page (Iraqi protests? Who cares when Jack Nicklaus is saying his goodbye to the National?) with an amazing lot of pictures. Everything they say about the National being gorgeous is absolutely true, but really, the whole city is in bloom this week. I didn’t realize how much I’d missed the azaleas until I saw them yesterday.

Today’s Chronicle coverage had several inches devoted to Tiger Wood’s unspectacular performance earlier in the week, as well as his suprising surge of seven straight birdies yesterday. Golf pundits just love to rag on Tiger — his swing, his caddie, his coach, his marriage. It’s why I want him to win. I’ve rarely cared in the past, but this year, I want Tiger to win as a giant birdie of another kind for all his detractors. As of this morning, he was in the lead, but the whole thing is too nerve-wracking for me to watch, so I’ve got the Cubs vs. the Brewers on instead.

(As an aside, I never thought I’d be typing “too nerve-wracking” as a descriptor for a golf game.)

I wanted to go the Braves game with AM today to see Smoltz start his first game at Turner Field since the ’90s. Of course, that meant I’d have to leave Augusta by 10:00 a.m., and that would never, ever happen. Even when we insist that we have to leave by 2:00 p.m., we don’t make it out of there because of laundry and clothes and not being able to leave unless we eat lunch and all our clothes smell like masala. So we had to skip this one, which I hear was a great Smoltz outing and a poor Braves one. (The Braves lost 6-1, but Smoltz had fifteen strikeouts.) Pedro pitched for the Mets, so it would have been a great game to see, especially with the lovely and amazing weather we’re having. I guess you take what you can get, though.

In the “Yay!” category, Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas tells TWoP the show has been picked up for a second season. Wheeee!

Updated 4/10/2005, 10:24 PM: It’s Tiger!

Woods reacts to the shot that secures his fourth green jacket.

Tonight when I was mentally telling someone off in my head, I thought (to said non-existent person who does actually exist but was not present at the time), “And if you want to know what’s going on with me, you can just read my blog because I wouldn’t tell you anymore than what I put on there anyway!”

And then I realized that I don’t actually talk much about me on my blog. I discuss politics and television and books. I make references to events I attend, and occasionally even describe one, but I don’t usually mention the more personal details like how I got all weepy at work when it sunk in that Aasif was probably going to pharmacy school in Charleston, six hours (by car) from Atlanta.

I don’t open that door because I am desi and we Don’t Do Emotions better than anyone else on the planet. Some things really are too personal, and some things, like work, are better kept off the Internet, but on the whole I think there’s a lot more to say than I’m saying, and I keep it to myself because it makes me uncomfortable to have everyone else know that I am going to miss and worry about my baby brother when he moves away. Among other things.

So I’ll try to be better, but that’s enough of that for now because I can’t be expected to jump right in all at once. The water might be a little cold.

A picture from the wedding in Ft. Lauderdale:

The bride and groom posing after dinner. Aren’t they cute?

And if you’re very nice, I’ll post the pic that Shaheen likes so much.

The Bulls are four games out of first place in the Central Division and will almost definitely make the playoffs. (Yay!) The Lakers will likely not make the playoffs this year. (Yay! Boo, hiss, Kobe!)

It’s like 1996, all over again.

In sad news, the Braves traded my favorite rookie Nick Green to Tampa Bay, where the weather is warmer and the team is suckier. (We’ll miss you, Nick!)