Be nice to yourself...rent Caddyshack ASAP. G. and I saw it this weekend and it's Hil-ar-i-ous.

We're living among boxes and suitcases. I find myself incorporating them into my daily activities--the box next to my desk is a handy surface for paperwork, the box in front of the TV makes a nice backrest.

I have a feeling this happy cohabitation is not going to last. Thank God we're moving this Saturday.

BFF

My oldest and dearest friend A. was in town this week visiting her family. She is hardly ever in town anymore (busy with work, remodeling house, etc) and lives too far away for me to jump in a car any old weekend and visit. It sucks.

We've known each other since middle school, but as members of different girl cliques, we weren't really friends. I (of course) was part of the less materialistic and cooler girl clique along with S., my other bff. A. and I bonded while enduring tortuous 10th grade geometry with the borderline pervert Mr. M. (seriously, how do people like him become high school teachers? Everybody has one or two or three in their high school experience who are so inappropriate.) Along with S. and another girl, we became invincible through 11th grade American History and yearbook, honing our cattiness on lame-ass students and teachers and exploring Juarez nightclubs.

Our friendship goes much farther than high school, into UTEP and personal crises of the early twenty-somethings. She can frustrate me like no other, yet at the same time, I know she's always on my side even during my most irrational moments. I love her visits. The rare times A., S., and I get together are truly golden moments, too. Never do I feel more understood or can be as open as with them (besides G., but that's a different relationship). I hope one day we get to live near one another; maybe El Paso will lure us back...

I've heard that the friendships you make in your 30's are never quite like friendships made earlier. I wonder if that's true.

P.S. Have you all rushed out to get your copy of March? While you're at it, pick up The Good Life by Jay McInerney. It's about how traumatic events like 9/11 make people reevaluate their lives, but not always follow through. Really good.

Two more weeks of summer school. Attendance was a little low today. My lecture went well--the Cold War is this week's topic. Planning on showing some clips from Atomic Cafe. It's a documentary that pieces together clips from newreels, TV shows, cartoon, photos from the Cold War-atomic age of the 1950's. Funny, but scary footage. I like to compare the gas masks and Duck and Cover footage to the duct tape, plastic sheeting, and gallons of water craze from right after 9/11. Remember that??

I'm anxious for summer school to end so I can prepare for our big move. We are moving to Westside EP. There are lots of pluses and minuses to the move: we're closer to UTEP, farther from my campus; closer to good restaurants, farther from our families; we lose the washer/dryer, gain another room and more closet space. And there is the actual moving part, like the packing and renting truck and hauling shit around. Never fun, makes me want to do some heavy cleaning and editing of our possessions. Like I don't really need that waffle iron, right?

A Few Books I Read This Summer

On Beauty, Zadie Smith
Gatsby's Girl, Caroline Preston
The Simplest Game: An Intelligent Fan's Guide to the World of Soccer, Paul Gardner
I Chose to Stand and Fight, Margaret Cho
Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Koren Zailickas
March, Geraldine Brooks

Out of the whole bunch I HIGHLY RECOMMEND March. The main character is the missing father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. He heads off in 1861 to serve as a chaplain in the Union Army, then as a schoolteacher for freed slaves. That story intertwines his young adulthood with being an idealistic, Transcendentalist, abolitionist married family man. I can't do justice to the amazing story that unfolds concerning relationships, idealism, and war. There are twists (but believable ones) until the very last chapter. I wish I could read it all over again for the first time.

I'd write more, but it's late and tomorrow is another dose of early morning tortue--uh, I mean yoga.

*PS. My list reminds of a reading program from elementary school called Book It. You got to put gold stickers on this big, ugly Book It button with so many pages read, then the major reading prize was a coupon for a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. Yum. Probably contributed to my current pizza-monster status.

Have I lost everybody?

I have returned. I might sound like a broken record when I say I've been busy. Sure, everybody's busy, right? Maybe I needed a little break from blogging, or at least the typing-it- all-out part of blogging. I've been blogging in my head the whole time, trying to work through my writing and researching issues and the daily grind of summer school. I was feeling frustrated with my blog entries, too. This blog was never supposed to be something to stress about, but I wanted to be creative and funny and witty and fabulous--you know, provide some entertaining fodder for my three readers out there--and that wasn't happening.

The desire to mull over the inane, provide excrutiating details about the everyday, and brag about the #1 cutest dog ever, Filo-Filomena, drew me back to the blog, so here I am. After all, where else can I wax on about delicious varieties of pizza?

Wow, two weeks since I've blogged. I vowed not to blog until I finish my article revisions and, well, it's taking me this long. And I'm still not done BUT the end is near. I think...