apropos of anything

Y’all, I just did three wedding receptions in three cities in three days. I am so tired my contacts are sticking to my eyeballs, and I didn’t even do any of the driving. I’ve never seen Clockwork Orange, but at this exact moment, I’m not averse to using toothpicks to prop my eyelids open. (Of course, if I ever see the movie, this post might one day make me recoil in horror, and then I can write another post about how stupid we are at twenty-six.)

This would really be better as a blog-in-pictures, if only the pictures were available to me. Some are; I’ll try to update as I get more. I’m not posting any photos of the brides or grooms, though.

At the Marriott on Pleasant Hill, right before the Saturday wedding. My brothers are wearing yellow pants in honor of the groom, who loves his own yellow pants and wears them ALL THE TIME. I am doing that photo thing I do when I’m uncomfortable with myself and not ready for the picture. Also, my clothes look blue when really they are purple.

The Saturday reception was at the Global Mall (it’s not just a mall, it’s a venue!) in Atlanta, and that was the only one where we had any shoe-stealing. We all know the shoe-stealing is the best part. This time, the two entourages played tug-of-war with the right shoe until finally the groom’s sister, her hands covered in scratches, grabbed it away and handed it to her friend… who casually held it in the direction of the groom, allowing someone from the bridal party to snatch it and go running across the reception hall, people from the groom’s side hot in pursuit.

Meanwhile, the groom took off his left shoe and passed it to my brother, who smuggled it out to his friend. Said friend waltzed into the hall five minutes later, waving the shoe as though it were the right shoe and thereby deflating the entire bride’s side as they assumed the shoe had been stolen right out from under them. And then we let them figure it out and steal the left shoe too. We were not good at this whole shoe-keeping thing.

Eventually they settled on $300 for the right shoe, which broke in the process, I think. And then we all went home. At two a.m.

Mansoor, our mother, and me at the reception hall on Sunday. Now that I see the pictures, I am wondering why nobody, not even my mother, told me my hijab was slipping on one side.

The wedding on Sunday was in Greensboro, North Carolina, so we woke up early-ish that morning to drive the six hours it would take us to get there, and then we hurriedly dressed (under hotel lighting even!) so we would be on time, and then we did wedding stuff. Some of us were lucky enough to participate from the Outcast Table in the corner, where we silently wept over our missing seat covers and wondered just how long it would take one of the kids to tip the ice sculpture onto themselves. Also whether the ice was so cold it would stick to their skin if they did.

Mansoor, me, and Aasif at the Savannah Rapids Pavilion at the beginning of the valima reception on Monday. You can’t really tell from the small picture, but I am making a face in this photo… I have a knack for missing the photog’s timing.

We girls took advantage of the bride and groom’s photo session on the other end of the deck to have a photo session of our own.

Monday’s reception was the most entertaining, I think. Valimas tends to be less formal, more jokey, especially where the bride and groom are concerned. Also, I like the Savannah Rapids Pavilion better than the Global Mall. The Monday night thing killed us, though, as we had to drive back to Atlanta the same night, which meant Mansoor and I didn’t get home until almost two in the morning, which meant we were pushing three before we got to sleep.

Tonight I have to go home and figure out what’s for dinner. Currently in my refrigerator there is leftover pineapple-mango upside down cake (but only a sliver), leftover banana caramel cake (from Mansoor’s birthday last week) with the not-at-all-sweet mascarpone frosting (partly Martha, I think, and partly I probably didn’t use enough confectioner’s sugar as I was racing to finish the cake before he got home from work), and leftover blackberry roulade (Martha totally redeemed herself) that I made for Saturday’s pre-wedding tea guests since I couldn’t exactly serve them only leftover birthday cake with not-sweet frosting. That’s a lot of cake, but not much “real” food.

How non-sequitor that was of me. I really am tired.

And then you will realize how incredibly stupid you were. I mean, I know all twenty-one and twenty-two year olds have some growing up to do, but man.

Saturday morning I pulled privet in Oakhurst with Trees Atlanta, which meant that I finally acquainted myself with the parasitic British plant after knowing for years that the Dursleys live on Privet Drive. It was the dirtiest I’ve ever gotten doing a volunteer project; even when I shoveled mulch for three hours during last year’s company volunteer day, I came away reasonably clean.

Saturday afternoon I went shopping for the first time in months. Lately I’ve bought more books than I have clothing as I just haven’t been interesed in browsing through multiple racks of slutty, expensive, or oh-so-cute-but-not-hijab-appropriate. Shockingly enough, I actually bought some things. Of course, this means for the first time in months, I’m going to have a high credit card bill (once you add in the plane ticket to Chicago I still have to buy), so now I’m debating whether I have to start over on my quest to cross number 37 off my 101 in 1001 list. I suppose I could cross off number thirty, though… probably could have done that with last year’s BoHo explosion that made long-sleeved, loose-fitting embroidered tops all the rage.

Saturday evening (or, technically, Sunday morning) I yelled at my neighbors because I’ve turned into a Crotchety Old Lady Who Has HAD IT With Those Kids Today. Throwing a massive party with a bass that causes my walls to shake is irritating, but okay, I’ll give you that. Charging out of your house shouting at the top of your lungs because you’re drunk and your cousin insulted you is NOT okay, not when it’s two-thirty in the morning and you just woke all your neighbors out of their sound sleep. I don’t really care if you’re still in college, but if you’re going to live in a neighborhood of fully-grown adults, we expect you to behave like a fully-grown adult.

And I didn’t really yell. It was more like a what the hell, and they deserved it.

Sunday I made a pineapple mango upside down cake for the Desperate Housewives dessert party we were having. I don’t really watch DH with any consistency anymore, and judging by the amount of talking we did through the episode, none of the other girls loves it like I do Veronica Mars, but as an excuse to hang out and eat cake, it sufficed. Because I was on the phone while I was mixing the batter, I forgot the 1 c. of sugar the recipe called for, but as long as you eat it with the fruit topping, you can’t tell. Much. And that’s why we have ice cream, right? The mango/pineapple combination was awesome, though.

That was my weekend. How have y’all been?

I think Grey’s Anatomy has lost it.

I don’t know if it was the pressure of pumping out 27 episodes this season (even though some of those episodes carried over from the abbreviated first season). I don’t know if it was the increasingly high expectations, or the pressure, or if the magic of the earlier episodes was sheer luck, but something is not working right now.

And yet, I bet the ratings have never been higher.

The “Mer/Der of it all”, as showrunner Shonda Rhimes puts it, is not what attracted me to this show, nor is it what made me stick around. I might be the exception, but I don’t think I’m that much the exception, especially given Derek’s recent behavior. I liked this show because of the relationships between the interns, the way they made mistakes and learned from them and supported each other. I loved the end of the Christmas episode when the camera panned out on Izzie, Mer, and George all lying under the Christmas tree because that’s what made Izzie feel better. I liked it because of Meredith’s tenuous relationship with her secretly-ill famous mother who has suddenly disappeared. The Mer/Der of it all was for me like perfume, pleasant in small, restrained quantities, but noxious in large doses.

It follows, then, that I’m bored and frustrated by the way that Mer and Der never go away. You’re married, Derek. Try paying attention to your rocking wife, who yes, cheated on you, but who is trying so hard to atone for her mistakes, and you’re throwing her just enough crumbs to make her keep trying even though she should really divorce your sorry, emotionally-cheating ass. You’re moving on, Meredith. You awesomely told Derek off in “Damage Control”, so KEEP AT IT. McVet has plans! How about we find out what they are?

That brings us to Izzie, formerly a great character, who has been reduced to a blithering, weepy, hysterical shrew who cares nothing for the career she’s worked so hard for, her ethics, her oath to do no harm, or anything else not named “Denny.” Katherine Heigl makes me believe Izzie loves Denny that completely, but the writing doesn’t hold up. It doesn’t make sense that she’d fall so hard or so fast, nor does it make sense that her superiors wouldn’t have built a ten-foot brick wall around Denny’s room to keep her out of it once they found out she was behaving inappropriately with a patient. It’s not in character for the girl who blew off her boyfriend for the hospital in “No Man’s Land”, the girl who was absolutely furious at Meredith for wrecking a charmed career when she herself had to struggle immensely for the same thing (“When you walk in the room, people are glad to see you. When I walk into the room, people hope I’m the nurse.”). That girl would never have gotten involved with a patient, and she certainly wouldn’t have risked her license for him.

I’ve been waiting for them to kill off Denny for months now, just so Izzie would go back to being herself and have something to do other than make goo-goo eyes at him. The interns’ reactions to Denny’s death were reminiscent of earlier episodes and so worked well, but then they had to go tack on the ridiculous Mer/Der hookup and the new McDreamy/Mer/McVet triangle, and I rolled my eyes so much I could see the back of my head.

Poor, poor Addison. I hope she goes after him with a stilleto.

The storylines, and more importantly, the characters, have been treading water for most of the season, and it’s just not good writing anymore. That’s not to say it’s not absorbing television because it is, and I was glued to all two hours of tonight’s season finale. There’s a difference between a show you can’t stop watching and a show you can’t wait to watch, though.

I’m not even going to discuss the ridiculous prom IN A HOSPITAL.

For a response to “17 Seconds”, Sunday’s episode, head over to Dan’s because he says it much funnier than I do.

Is it a good or a bad thing if your colleagues salute you as you leave work for the day?

Y’all, I think I have a problem.

I buy a lot of books. A lot of books. I can’t remember the last time I bought clothes, but last weekend I debated between Quicksilver, The History of Love, and Never Let Me Go for almost an hour before finally settling on Quicksilver because it’s the one I’ve been watching the longest. I even temporarily debated buying all three.

Quicksilver is almost 900 pages long. So, by the way, is Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I’ve been working on for several months now. I’ve been sitting one-third of the way through Artemis Fowl because I happened to pick up Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire last Friday, which meant I finished both that and Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix over the weekend (both of them 800+ page tomes), and am now rapidly reconsuming Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in the evenings. This week, that’s meant after eleven since my calendar’s been full to bursting, but that’s another post, coming soon, maybe.

I have more then a dozen books sitting at home waiting to be read. Some are nonfiction, which I usually only pick up if I am in a particular mood, but I have no excuses for stacking up the works of fiction. I know shouldn’t buy more books until I’ve finished the ones I already have, but they have such intriguing covers, or such good buzz, and after all, the very nature of an addiction is to suck you further and further in.

Perhaps I need a reading vacation, like Tammy. Or perhaps I should just limit myself to adding books to a wishlist instead of my bookshelf, at least until I make some headway with the backlog.

Rereading the Harry Potters in such rapid succession made me like Order of the Pheonix far more than I have in the past. When I first bought the book, I hadn’t read any Harry Potter in months, so the universe and the events from Goblet of Fire weren’t so fresh in my head. The plot choices, character development, and editing irriated me so much that sometimes I considered Harry to be the literary version of whiny Luke Skywalker from his A New Hope days.

In context of its predecessor, though, OotP works much better, and I find that pretty amazing. Television writers have trouble remembering details from episode to episode, and they churn those out over the course of a compressed year. Rowling, on the other hand, wrote 800 pages, and then another 800 pages, over the course of several years, yet still managed to retain such a uniform, tightly-written story that one book feeds seamlessly into the next. I wonder how many times she has to read her own work to be that familiar with the details that carry over from one book to another.

There’s more to be said, about Harry Potter, about Kaavya Viswanathan and How Opal Metha Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, but I have to go now. Two thousand pages aren’t just going to read themselves.