Who doesn't love the Muppets?

Thanksgiving Over...

Well, the day of gluttony is over. And it's 2am on black Friday. I was exhausted after eating dinner around 3pm and I could have gone to sleep then. But after much alcohol and wii playing with my boys, I am home now and completely wired.

Food that is now in my belleh...

Danny, Shawn, Me, Harmony and Brianna

I was planning on venturing out into the world tomorrow (today actually) to do some shopping. I was going to go to Fry's to get the camera that I'm sure my friends are sick of hearing me talk about. It's a good deal in the store, but I did the math... with no tax on amazon it is cheaper by about 13 bucks, and it ships to me. That means no fighting with the crowds at 5am. So, yay for simple math for letting me sleep in this lovely Friday morning!

I'll probably place my order over the next few days. Big girl camera, here I come!

(isn't she pretty...)

Boy Stuff

So, it's been a big weekend for me. I set up password protection for my wireless internet (finally!), got a DVR and set up my HD (finally!) and me and Manda changed her flat tire to her doughnut in the dark (*high-five* for awesomeness and it's about time!)

Not that I don't have confidence in doing this sort of stuff, but it was good to do (in one weekend) a bunch of stuff that normally I would have relied on someone else to do. We'll call them boyfriend jobs. As I said in my facebook post about this, glad I did them instead of some guy helping me out, but I do... "like watching them work." It's the whole, I dont need you, but I like it when you're around deal.

But right now, there's no guy. Maybe soonish? I don't know.

In the meantime, I'll change more tires and maybe hook up my Slingbox.

Halloween 2009 Wrap-up

So... I helped Mr. Felix (it's complicated...don't judge) with his Halloween costume this year. He won 1st place for "funniest costume" at his work. I'm really proud of how it all came together. I even made a special huge Wonka Bar for a prop.



I also helped Amanda with a few pieces for her "(trying not to be too racist...) indian girl costume." She looked awesome. (Picture by Lan Bui, who's totally awesome too!)

Family Part 2

I love my family, but I've never known in my family the feeling of community. oh boo-hoo... from a broken home, but it's true. My friends are my family.

Alpha Chi Omega

I've been spending a lot more time with my sisters in LA. It's nice to make connections with ladies who, up until a few months ago, I had never met before. One thing that I love about hanging out with them is that they seem to see so much potential in me. Expectations without pressure. It's really great. And without knowing to much about me, just because I am a sister, they know I can do great things (or at least try.) I feel the same way about them. All of the "real, strong women" stuff is very true, but the sisters here in LA are very much like the ones who made me want to take that path into sorority life in the first place.

Gush, gush, gush. And yes, I'm totally biased. ΑΧΩ is the best.

Banks

Though I haven't had any problems with my simple checking account (yet), there is a disgustingly large number of stories about banks messing up peoples personal and business accounts. Simple stuff, like making sure deposits get to the correct account, not a strangers, and running through all checks from a deposit, so magically the deposit slip doesn't match up with the amount that shows on the account... insanity!

Again... not rocket science.

And what repercussions does an account holder have. Little to none. They make a mistake and the individual, the customer, has to wait for weeks for the bank to get their act together. In the end, they just end up stealing from the customer. (I know, shocker there!) If a customer makes a mistake and makes a profit, the bank adjusts or corrects the mistake on it's own. If we refuse, it's stealing. If they lolly-gag in correcting a mistake, do we get interest? Nope, they just suck.

I have been played games on by my credit card companies, and lots of people have in the past year or so. At least they are under more scrutiny by the government and , even though they are pushing against it, reforms are slowly happening.

Lets work on that and the health care industry. KThxByee!

Old School Lady Gaga

Here's a clip of old school Lady Gaga. It's from 2005. Can you imagine how much her life has changed in 4 years? Crazieness...! And the panelest at the end of the video compares her to Norah Jones... even 4 years ago she was NOTHING like Norah Jones... ok, 2 things similar... she's a woman and she plays the piano. Thanks for the commentary, rocket scientist.

From that to this... in 4 years. Good Stuff.

Who's got the funk...

Me. I'm in a funk tonight, don't know why. I got a little frustrated this afternoon, but it stuck with me through tonight. Oh boo.

I did find an awesome video of an exploding whale though...

The Fountain

I watched "The Fountain" tonight. It's a Hugh Jackman movie. I lit some candles, curled up on the couch with a fat cat. I did stop myself from pouring a glass of wine, that was too close to an actual date.

I liked the movie, but only for the production design and cinematography. It was beautiful to look at, but what the movie itself was trying to convey is a little beyond me, just a few steps too far. I got the whole death and rebirth concept, it was packaged as a tree of life/fountain of youth/finding nirvana (etc.) concept, layered with Mayan mythology. All that mish-mosh I did like, it was confusing, but I didn't hate it.

After the movie ended, I went straight to the extra features to look for a commentary. Nope. Nothing. And this is one movie that NEEDED one badly! I watched the behind the scenes featurette, and I realized about half way through, that the production team really didn't have one cohesive story. One of the film-makers had creative input on "Requiem for a Dream", and though it didn't help at explaining anything, that explained why some of the thoughts weren't carried through to the audience. Things maybe sloppily, naively, or purposely left unclear and open-ended.

Meh... I wouldn't exactly recommend it, but it was beautiful and I didn't hate it.

Gerard Butler

"Right now, yes, I question a bunch of things in my life and I am in a lot of ways more comfortable than ever. I know what still excites me and what is just never going to happen," said the actor. "But then also there are things I have different opinions on. Sometimes I think: ‘God, I wish I was married now, and had kids.’ Other times I think: 'Thank Christ I am not married and don’t have kid yet, I can do that later.'" - Gerard Butler

hey! normal guys... you are not Gerard Butler... get it together!

Mellow Week

This week has been the most mellow week I've had in a long time. I slept a lot, 11 hrs last night. If you know me at all, then you know I'm a big sleeper and I needed a good one. The sad part is, I could have kept sleeping, but it's a good thing I'm employed so I HAVE to get up eventually.

Anyways, I digress... I am kind of sad the the Team In Training season is over after 2 years (our season ended with the Marin County Tri last Sunday), but will be nice to have my weekends and tuesdays/wednesday nights back. I can go somewhere for the weekend now, of course finding someone to go with and somewhere to go is always an issue, but it's good to feel free.

I need some time away from Tnt. I've loved most of my 4 seasons and will probably go back eventually, but I don't want it to be the only thing that I do. (I've said this all before) I love the cause too, but I can still give by attending my friends fundraisers who are still involved with TnT, that's the fun part.

It's getting close to the holidays too and I'd like to do a volunteer night with "One Voice" again, I had a great time doing that last year (even if Ewan McGregor hadn't have been there. He's a nice lookin' fellow... yeah...)

(Yeah...)

So... anyways... focus mollye, focus.

One thing about having an open schedule is that I get to be open to what comes next. Who knows.

I am starting a mentoring program for "at risk" 7th and 8th grade girls called MOSTE this Saturday. I have a training session and then a picnic to meet possible mentees. It's going to be a long commitment, at least one school year, but hopefully up to 6 years (until the girl gets out of high school.) I think it'll be fun.

I'm listening to Norah Jones... she's good stuff.

Lines from the office today:

"Comedians come in one flavor, self-loathing."

"He was covered in prophylactics?"

Renee Zellweger's Extreme Sour Lemon Candy

I've always thought she looked like she just ate Lemons...

T-Mobile Outage

So T-Mobile was broken today. I liked it, but there were crazy people posing on twitter.

*you might not survive without your phone for a few hours, omg, omg~!*

here are some gems...

• T-mobile...thanks for ruining my day, u suck!
• FUCK YOU T-MOBILE! UGHHHH!
• fuck you T-mobile and your whack ass service! i can't even text people back or i miss texts/calls because service is ALWAYS unavailable!
• I hate you, T-Mobile.

Seriously people. It's not the end of the world.

Cautionary Matrons.

Here's a repost of an article from The Observer

...Amanda and I have been talking a lot about this lately. Wanting kids, having a partner, and getting things that we can't have or get by ourselves. I don't have answers for the question of "how to get what I want"... or more like what I'd like to have.

And also to say that I don't want big "life stuff" right this minute, but it's a theme in conversation lately.

Part of me thinks it's LA and guys in LA. Maybe it takes leaving LA to search for it... i don't know.

The Cautionary Matrons

By Irina AleksanderOctober 20, 2009 | 7:20 p.m

In March of last year, The Atlantic published an essay by Lori Gottlieb titled “Marry Him! The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough,” which Ms. Gottlieb wrote when, in her idealistic search for the One, she found herself alone in her 40s with a son she had via a sperm donor. A book based on the article will be published in February and has already been optioned by Tobey Maguire for Warner Brothers, with Jill Soloway (Six Feet Under) writing the screenplay.

The following year, the magazine published another essay by Sandra Tsing Loh, 47, announcing the end of her 20-year marriage—she had an affair—and cautioning readers against what can happen when your husband considers mastering the perfect bouillabaisse recipe a more titillating activity than giving his wife an orgasm.

Meanwhile, remember Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, who once sat crouched on the floor, a young girl staring up at readers through all that self-conscious eyeliner? Now 42, Ms. Wurtzel wrote a piece in Elle this year about her fading beauty and the lonely dating life that accompanies it. Never too shy to turn herself inside out on paper, she is expanding the article into a book.

Now about me: I am 25 and single. If this were the 1950s, one of my multiyear relationships would have resulted in marriage by now. If this were the 1980s, I would concern myself only with purchasing a really nice shoulder-padded suit. Our mothers and grandmothers seemed to have sound instructions. But now—now that the generation of women ahead of us has begun to sound regretful, shouting at us, “Don’t end up like me!”—what we have instead are Cautionary Matrons, issuing what feel like incessant warnings.

Single 40-something women warn us about being too career-oriented and forgetting to factor in children; married women warn us that marriage is a union in which sex and fidelity are optional; and divorced women warn us to keep our weight down, our breasts up and our skin looking like Saran Wrap unless we want our husbands to later leave us for 23-year-olds.

Essays written by Cautionary Matrons are one of the few genres dominated by our gender; Laura Kipnis’ Against Love: A Polemic and Cristina Nehring’s A Vindication of Love, which landed on the cover of The Times’ Book Review, also come to mind. Not that men are strangers to personal narratives, of course. There’s Jonathan Ames, whose frank tales of his sexual adventures have landed him on HBO; and New Yorker writer Tad Friend, who as part of the research for his recently published memoir went on the self-absorbed quest of asking exes whether he was “a mild jerk or a total jerk.” But while men tend to be cheerfully self-deprecating, women are downright apologetic, asking themselves what they’ve done wrong and how to fix it.

Cautionary Matrons extend beyond nonfiction. In Lorrie Moore’s new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, the protagonist, a 20-year-old college student named Tassie Keltjin, looks over at the older woman who has hired her to be the baby sitter of a baby she has yet to adopt into an already lonely marriage and makes the following observation: “These middle-aged women seemed very tired to me, as if hope had been wrung out of them and replaced with a deathly, walking sort of sleep.”

And then there is ABC’s new show Cougar Town. It’s meant to tease out the empowering side of being 40 and single. But few viewers actually want to a visit a place where even someone as MILF-y as Courteney Cox self-tauntingly tugs the goose skin on her elbows—isn’t elbow skin supposed to be loose?—and refers to her vagina as a “coochie cooch.” And there is Jennifer Aniston. She’s not the Cautionary Matron; it is the hidden tabloid editor who sends her threatening missives by blowing up Ms. Aniston’s thighs alongside headlines shrieking: Old! Alone! Childless!

Of course not all women are unhappy, despite that recent General Social Survey cited by Maureen Dowd and Time (and disputed by Barbara Ehrenreich in Salon). Tabloid-media powerhouse Bonnie Fuller instructed women on how to have the job, the guy and “everything else you’ve ever wanted” in her 2006 book, The Joys of Much Too Much. But how many others are encouragingly passing along the handwritten recipe of their success to us, their younger counterparts? Where are the role models less frightening than Bonnie Fuller?

‘GET MARRIED BY 32’

Last week, I brought all of this up to my friend Jenny, who is 29, single and works in publishing. We were at her Williamsburg apartment and she was making pork chops.

The phrase Cautionary Matron reminded Jenny of a woman whose novel she edited a few years ago. This 40-something author’s novel (and reality) was about an older woman who was desperate to have a child but was dating a man she didn’t like very much, and so over countless lunches and drinks, their talks about the book often turned to men. Or, more specifically, a man Jenny had broken up with and was considering reuniting with.

“And she said, ‘Well, you’re not in a position where you need to do that just yet,’” said Jenny. “But just make sure, whatever you do, that you get married by age 32. Because if you’re not married by 32, no one will want you and you’ll end up like me.”

Jenny leaned back in her chair and swirled her glass of wine. “It was just such a crazy thing to say!” she said. “But it was so honest, too, that it still haunts me. It’s not that I even think ticktock in a biological sense. I think ticktock in terms of what she said about turning 32! And how crazy is that?”

And yet the messages stick. After Jenny read Ms. Gottlieb’s piece in The Atlantic, she stayed an extra year in a relationship that she wanted to end at the time. “I was thinking it wasn’t working out, and then I read that piece and I thought, ‘Well, he’s a nice, cute guy who likes me; maybe I shouldn’t break it off,’” she said.

Last week, by phone, Ms. Gottlieb said this was not her intention and that her forthcoming book will clarify things a bit. (After the article, she received countless letters from women—alarmed by her tale of loneliness—who had read it and immediately got engaged to their less-than-scintillating boyfriends.)

“The article was like I was someone’s big sister and I was saying here’s my experience and all of the misconceptions I had,” Ms. Gottlieb said. “I think you guys are actually lucky because you’ll get a more mixed set of messages. When I was in my 20s, women were all about having it all and ‘a guy is great but he is not the main course.’ We got a single message and it was all, me, me, me, me, me. ‘You go girl!’ And now those of us that grew up with these messages are finally admitting that those messages of empowerment may actually conflict with what we want.

”Ms. Tsing Loh’s piece was directed at her generation, but she said she wasn’t surprised that young women were reading. She speculated about the reason for this apparent surge in matronly warnings: “I think because we’re really surprised!” she screamed into the receiver. “In our 20s, the world was totally our oyster. All those fights had been fought. We weren’t going to be ’50s housewives, we were in college, we could pick and choose from a menu of careers, and there were all these interesting guys out there not like our dads. We were smart women who had a lot of options and made intelligent choices and that’s why we’re writing these pieces. We’re shocked!” Shocked because even with all those choices, Ms. Tsing Loh’s marriage didn’t work out.

“It must be very confusing,” she said sympathetically. “We were the protégés of old-guard feminists: ‘Don’t have a baby, or if you must, have one, wait till your 40s.’ We were sold more of a mission plan and now you guys … Well, sadly, it all seems like kind of a mess. There is no mission. Even stay-at-home moms feel unsuccessful unless they’re canning their own marmalade and selling it on the Internet. You just have a bunch of drunk, depressed 45-year-old ladies going, ‘A-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH!’”

THE ANTI-MENTOR

At a birthday party later last week, in the West Village, I ran into my friend Caryne, who is 31, single, tall and striking, and works at a nonprofit. When I asked her if she’s ever had a Cautionary Matron, she widened her eyes and nodded. “I call her my Anti-Mentor!” she said.

Caryne’s Cautionary Matron is her former boss, who never married but had a series of disappointing romances. “Rarely do I hang up the phone with her and feel comforted. Usually, I feel anxiety and paralysis about the decisions that I need to make to avoid everything she warns me about.”

I asked Caryne why she thought our mentors have taken to enjoining rather than encouraging us. She said she had to think about it and rang me a few days later.

“They are the first generation of women who were presented with choices,” she said. “I think they are in the process of reflecting on a half-century of existence and are realizing that ‘having it all’ was really a lie. Sometimes I think the idea of ‘having it all’ can almost be more disempowering than ‘having it all’ because one is never allowed enough time or energy to excel in one area of their life.

”When confronted with grim advice, some young women go on the offensive. Said Jenny of her Cautionary Matron: “I think there is an element of jealousy there. If she can go back and do it over again, she would. But she can’t and I’m here so …”

Ms. Gottlieb had a response to this: “I think it’s part denial and part arrogance. I get it because I used to be that way in my 20s. I wanted the fairy tale. I thought that I deserved to have it, that it was my inalienable right! So that’s the arrogance, and the denial is that they simply can’t acknowledge that they, too, could become these older regretful women who wished they knew what was important in love earlier on. We’re not envious—we’re wiser.

”Ms. Wurtzel echoes this sentiment, writing in her Elle piece: “Age is a terrible avenger. The lessons of life give you so much to work with, but by the time you’ve got all this great wisdom, you don’t get to be young anymore.” And later: “Oh, to be 25 again and get it right.”

When I contacted Ms. Wurtzel, hoping for an extra pearl or two about how I, as a 25-year-old, might learn from her mistakes and “get it right,” she emailed that she “didn’t have an audience in mind when I wrote it, but if anything I was thinking in terms of people who could relate to it, not so much people who could learn from it.” She also backpedaled a bit from her cautionary stance. “Of course, I’m 42 and I’m not married, but I don’t feel sorry for myself. … It’s not that I’m not sad sometimes, but I’m definitely not sorry.”

Perhaps. But then there’s this part in her piece about her love life today: “Dating this person for three months, that one for a few weeks, sometimes longer. They come, they go, someone is always coming as someone else is going; it’s not like there’s no one, but it’s all so lonely.

”When Jenny—already fearful about turning 32, thanks to her personal Cautionary Matron—read Ms. Wurtzel’s article, she emailed me the following: “Ugh. Now I am going to sit, coma-like, on the sofa and contemplate my impending decay. Great.”

ialeksander@observer.com