SONG OF THE DAY: "Headlights"

"Headlights"
By Morning Parade
5 Bookmarks (can I give bookmarks to a song?)

I LOVE this song.  This band has potential to rival Snow Patrol for my affections...... 

COMMENTARY: "Pretending"

So this past week I had the opportunity to spend a few days in a city I don’t get to visit nearly often enough. That's right! 

                         VEGAS, BABY!

While there, I was able to dress a little differently than I normally do:

I ate at fancy restaurants, saw fun shows, and enjoyed unbelievable art:

Oh yeah, and I even got to “relax”.

In short, I was playing "make-believe"; pretending to be someone I am not.

Pretending to be a party girl. Pretending to have a lot of spare cash floating around. Pretending to not have a care in the world.  Pretending to be MUCH younger than I actually am.  Pretending to be the center of attention.  Pretending to be a whole lot of things (I can't share the photo of me with the Thunder From Down Under but believe me, it was epic!)

It’s not that I don’t like that person I was pretending to be (in fact, I kind of love her!), it’s just that that person doesn’t really fit in with my normal day-to-day existence. In my “real” life, I can’t go dancing every night and I can’t eat at five-star restaurants. I can’t spend entire days lazing away by a pool after sleeping in until Noon (frankly, in Colorado there are only a handful of days even warm enough to go to a pool….). And relaxing?  Hahaha!  In real life, I don’t know the meaning of the word.  

Instead, in the “real” world, I wake every morning and do all the things a normal person does (including sitting down at the end of the day to play my Scrabble and Words with Friends games), drop off to sleep, then do it all over again.

My daughter missed me while I was gone. 

And I missed her. 

I love my life. I love my family. I love my work. But it’s sometimes just a little too "real". And I kinda like playing make believe. I like being that “other” girl. 

Wait a minute.......

Actually,

Now that I think about it......




Maybe I’m just pretending to be a civilized businesswoman..... wife.....  mother...... and productive member of society.

When actually,







I really am a party girl........




(Even if only for just a few days a year.)

BOOK REVIEW: "There but for the"

There but for the
By Ali Smith
Copyright 2011
Pantheon Books
Adult Fiction
1 Bookmark

So there I was, reading a list of MUST READ BOOKS OF 2011 and I came across this title.  Intriguing.  There but for the what?, I thought.  So I queued up the book on my library account and waited for a copy to become available so I could find out.

When I picked up the book, I was kind of disappointed at the cover.  I mean, really.  No picture.  No art.  No anything but a typewriter font of the title (they even had to declare it was "a novel" on the cover because otherwise no one would have known).  I'm a big fan of clever book covers, so this was strike number one.

Strike number two came pretty quickly after that when I got about halfway through the first page of the introduction and realized the story was to be told with the dialect of a 10-year-old.  I have a 10-year-old.  I really don't have much interest reading a book written in the style of what I hear on a daily basis.  But I kept reading.  Because, after all, this was on a MUST READ list. 

Chapter one started out a little better; no longer in the childish vernacular, but with a more traditional story-teller tone.  However, a few short paragraphs later, I once again ran into trouble when the story slipped into some pretty hefty word association and strayed into some unbelievably ridiculous tangents.  Strike number three.  Frankly, it just went downhill from there. 

To summarize what there is of a plot, you have a dinner party where one of the guests has brought a guest of his own.  Sometime between dinner and dessert, the guest's guest (named Miles) goes upstairs and just doesn't come back down.  In fact, he has locked himself into a bedroom/bath suite and refuses to come out.  He refuses to talk to anyone.  He merely sends out a note with what he requests to be fed while he is holed up in the room.  And he stays there.  For months.  The homeowners are furious, but don't want to break down their antique door.  The media finds out and reports on the story. The crazies of the world come out of hiding and set up camp around the house to worship the guy holed up in the room.

The book is basically four long chapters about four characters who vaguely know Miles and how they know him.  And that's it.  Yep, that's right.  That's the whole story.  I got to the end, turned the page and was like "huh?"  I just read 236 pages to find out.....nothing?  What a waste of my valuable reading time! 

There were a few saving graces in the book (thus the 1 bookmark rating instead of a big, fat ZERO).  The author threw in a few great little one-liners like "Google is so strange.  It promises everything, but everything isn't there."  Also, one of the characters in the book, Brooke (the 10-year-old of the introduction) is a little miss smarty pants, uses lots of big words, refers to herself as a "cleverist" and has some giggle-worthy monologues.  In one, she is complaining about a play that put her to sleep.  She calls it an "Alps of boredom" (I could totally picture my own 10-year-old saying something like this). 

So I know this was on the MUST READ list for 2011.  But really, it just rambles and goes off on all these tangents that don't take you anywhere. Not worth the read, even for the one-liners.  And I still don't know the answer to the question There but for the what?

 

SONG OF THE DAY: M83 "Midnight City"